UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 


73  0 


u.  &  u. 


RT.    HON.    DAVID    LLOYD   GEORGE 


THE    MIRRORS   OF 
DOWNING  STREET 

SOME  POLITICAL  REFLECTIONS 

BY 
A  GENTLEMAN  WITH  A  DUSTER 


''Right  and  wrong  are  in  the  nature  of  things. 
They  are  not  words  and  phrases.  They  are  in 
the  nature  of  things,  and  if  you  transgress  the 
laws  laid  down,  imposed  by  the  nature  of  things, 
depend  upon  it  you  will  pay  the  penalty." 

JOHN  MORLEY. 


G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 
NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 
Ifcnfcfeerbocfter  press 
1921 


310! 


COPYRIGHT.  1921 

BY 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 


••  v 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  A  merico 


S519 


J)  A 

. 
A  I  E>3 


5  fc  6. 


PUBLISHERS'   NOTE 

AMERICA  and  England  have  worked  and  fought  to- 
gether and  have  brought  to  a  successful  conclusion 
the  great  war  in  defence  of  civilization  against  a  mili- 
tary imperialism  which  was  threatening  to  dominate 
the  world.  They  have  now  responsibilities  together  in 
connection  with  the  measures  needed  to  assure  the 
continued  peace  of  the  world  and  to  secure,  particularly 
for  the  smaller  states  and  for  communities  not  in  a 
position  to  become  independent  nations,  the  protection 
of  their  liberties,  to  which  they  have  as  assured  a  right 
as  that  asserted  by  a  state  of  first  importance  which 
can  support  its  claims  with  great  armies. 

In  this  work  of  helping  to  adjust  the  present  urgent 
problems  of  the  world,  England  is  demanding  co-oper- 
ation from  America.  America  could  not  if  she  would, 
and  would  not  if  she  could,  escape  her  responsibilities, 
as  the  strongest  nation  in  the  world,  a  nation  standing 
for  the  rights  of  men,  for  leadership  in  the  family  of 
nations.  With  these  joint  responsibilities  resting  upon 
England  and  America,  the  personalities  of  the  men 
who  have  during  the  past  few  years  had  in  their  hands 
the  direction  of  the  affairs  of  the  United  Kingdom  and 


vi  PUBLISHERS'  NOTE 

of  the  great  British  Commonwealth  must  possess  an 
assured  interest  for  every  intelligent  American. 

The  clever  author  of  The  Mirrors  of  Downing  Street 
has  brought  together  a  series  of  critical  and  biographical 
studies,  presented  as  "reflections"  from  the  mirror  in 
the  Imperial  council  chamber,  of  thirteen  typical  Britons 
who  have  done  noteworthy  work  during  the  years  of 
the  war  and  who  are  now  grappling  with  the  problems 
of  the  peace.  The  name  of  the  author  is  not  given,  but 
he  is  evidently  one  who  has  had  intimate  personal  as- 
sociation with  the  statesmen  and  administrators  whose 
characters  he  presents.  These  analyses  are  not  always 
sympathetic,  and  we  are  not  prepared  to  say  that  they 
will  be  accepted  as  final.  They  are,  however,  based 
upon  full  knowledge  of  the  conditions  and  a  close 
personal  study  of  the  men.  Intelligent  Americans 
will  be  interested  in  the  opinions  held  by  a  clear-headed, 
capable  English  writer  of  the  characters  of  leaders  like 
Mr.  Asquith,  Lloyd  George,  Mr.  Balfour,  Lord  Robert 
Cecil,  Winston  Churchill,  and  others,  and  they  will  find 
in  these  pages  first-hand  information  and  clever  and 
incisive  studies  of  noteworthy  men  whose  influence  has 
counted,  and  is  still  to  count,  in  shaping  the  history  of 
Britain  and  of  the  world. 

G.  H.  P. 

NEW  YORK,  December,  1920. 


INTRODUCTION 

LET  me  say  that  I  hope  I  have  not  betrayed  any  con- 
fidences in  these  sketches. 

Public  men  must  expect  criticism,  and  no  criticism  is 
so  good  for  them,  and  therefore  for  the  State,  as  critic- 
ism of  character;  but  their  position  is  difficult,  and 
they  may  justly  complain  when  those  to  whom  they 
have  spoken  in  the  candour  of  private  conversation 
make  use  of  such  confidences  for  a  public  purpose. 

If  here  and  there  I  have  in  any  degree  approached 
this  offence,  let  me  urge  two  excuses.  First,  inspired 
by  a  pure  purpose  I  might  very  easily  have  said  far  more 
than  I  have  said:  and,  second,  my  purpose  is  neither 
to  grind  my  own  axe  (as  witness  my  anonymity)  nor 
to  inflict  personal  pain  (as  witness  my  effort  to  be 
just  in  all  cases),  but  truly  to  raise  the  tone  of  our  public 
life. 

It  is  the  conviction  that  the  tone  of  our  public  life  is 
low,  and  that  this  low  tone  is  reacting  disastrously  in 
many  directions,  which  has  set  me  about  these  studies 
in  political  personality. 

There  is  too  much  dust  on  the  mirrors  of  Downing 
Street  for  our  public  men  to  see  themselves  as  others 
see  them.  Some  of  that  dust  is  from  the  war;  some 

vii 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

of  it  is  the  old-fashioned  political  dust  intended  for  the 
eyes  of  the  public;  but  I  think  that  the  worst  of  all 
hindrances  to  true  vision  is  breathed  on  the  mirrors 
by  those  self -regarding  public  men  in  whom  principle 
is  crumbling  and  moral  earnestness  is  beginning  to 
moulder.  One  would  wipe  away  those  smears. 

My  duster  is  honest  cotton ;  the  hand  that  holds  it  is 
at  least  clean ;  and  the  energy  of  the  rubbing  is  inspired 
solely  by  the  hope  that  such  labour  may  be  of  some 
benefit  to  my  country. 

I  think  our  statesmen  may  be  better  servants  of  the 
great  nation  they  have  the  honour  to  serve  if  they  see 
themselves  as  others  see  them — others  who  are  not 
political  adversaries,  and  who  are  more  interested  in  the 
moral  and  intellectual  condition  of  the  State  than  in  the 
fortunes  of  its  parties. 

No  man  can  ever  be  worthy  of  England ;  but  we  must 
be  anxious  when  the  heart  and  centre  of  public  service 
are  not  an  earnest  desire  to  be  as  worthy  of  her  as 
possible. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

PUBLISHER'S  NOTE v 

i  INTRODUCTION vii 

I. — MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE  i 

II. — LORD  CARNOCK 19 

III. — LORD  FISHER    ......  29 

IV. — MR.  ASQUITH 39 

V. — LORD  NORTHCLIFFE   .....  49 

VI. — MR.  ARTHUR  BALFOUR      ....  59 

VII. — LORD  KITCHENER 71 

VIII.-^LoRD  ROBERT  CECIL          ....  85 

IX.-^MR.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL          ...  97 

X. — LORD  HALDANE 109 

XI. — LORD  RHONDDA 123 

XII. — LORD  INVERFORTH 135 

XIII. — LORD  LEVERHULME    .         .         .         .         .151 

XIV. — CONCLUSION 163 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING  PAGE 

Rx.  HON.  DAVID  LLOYD  GEORGE  Frontispiece 

LORD  CARNOCK     .......  20 

BARON  FISHER      .......  30 

RT.  HON.  HERBERT  HENRY  ASQUITH     ...  40 

LORD  NORTHCLIFFE 50 

RT.  HON.  ARTHUR  JAMES  BALFOUR  60 

LORD  KITCHENER          ......  72 

LORD  ROBERT  CECIL 86 

RT.  HON.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL     ....  98 

RT.  HON.  RICHARD  BURDON  HALDANE  .         .        .  no 

LORD  RHONDDA 124 

LORD  INVERFORTH 136 

LORD  LEVERHULME 152 


MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE 


THE  RT.  HON.  DAVID  LLOYD  GEORGE 

Born,  Manchester,  1863;  son  of  the  late  Wm.  George,  Master  of  the 
Hope  Street  Unitarian  Schools,  Liverpool.  Educated  in  a  Welsh 
Church  School  and  under  tutors.  By  profession  a  solicitor.  President 
of  the  Board  of  Trade,  1905-8;  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer,  1908-15; 
Minister  of  Munitions,  1915-16;  Secretary  for  War,  1916;  Prime  Minis- 
ter, 1916-20. 


CHAPTER  I 
MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE 

"And  wars,  like  mists  that  rise  against  the  sun, 
Made  him  but  greater  seem,  not  greater  grow. " 

DRYDEN. 

IF  you  think  about  it,  no  one  since  Napoleon  has  ap- 
peared on  the  earth  who  attracts  so  universal  an  interest 
as  Mr.  Lloyd  George.  This  is  a  rather  startling  thought. 

It  is  significant,  I  think,  how  completely  a  politician 
should  overshadow  all  the  great  soldiers  and  sailors 
charged  with  their  nation's  very  life  in  the  severest  and 
infinitely  the  most  critical  military  struggle  of  man's 
history. 

A  democratic  age,  lacking  in  colour,  and  antipathetic 
to  romance,  somewhat  obscures  for  us  the  pictorial 
achievement  of  this  remarkable  figure.  He  lacks  only 
a  crown,  a  robe,  and  a  gilded  chair  easily  to  outshine  in 
visible  picturesqueness  the  great  Emperor.  His  achieve- 
ment, when  we  consider  what  hung  upon  it,  is  greater 
than  Napoleon's,  the  narrative  of  his  origin  more  roman- 
tic, his  character  more  complex.  And  yet  who  does  not 
feel  the  greatness  of  Napoleon? — and  who  does  not 
suspect  the  shallowness  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George? 

History,  it  is  certain,  will  unmask  his  pretensions  to 

3 


4     THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

grandeur  with  a  rough,  perhaps  with  an  angry  hand; 
but  all  the  more  because  of  this  unmasking  posterity  will 
continue  to  crowd  about  the  exposed  hero  asking,  and 
perhaps  for  centuries  continuing  to  ask,  questions  con- 
cerning his  place  in  the  history  of  the  world.  "How 
came  it,  man  of  straw,  that  in  Armageddon  there  was 
none  greater  than  you? " 

The  coldest-blooded  amongst  us,  Mr.  Massingham  of 
The  Nation  for  example,  must  confess  that  it  was  a 
moment  rich  in  the  emotion  which  bestows  immortality 
on  incident  when  this  son  of  a  village  schoolmaster,  who 
grew  up  in  a  shoemaker's  shop,  and  whose  boyish  games 
were  played  in  the  street  of  a  Welsh  hamlet  remote  from 
all  the  refinements  of  civilization  and  all  the  clangours 
of  industrialism,  announced  to  a  breathless  Europe  with- 
out any  pomposity  of  phrase  and  with  but  a  brief  and 
contemptuous  gesture  of  dismissal  the  passing  away  from 
the  world's  stage  of  the  Hapsburgs  and  Hohenzollerns 
— those  ancient,  long  glorious,  and  most  puissant  houses 
whose  history  for  an  aeon  was  the  history  of  Europe. 

Such  topsy-turvydom,  such  historical  anarchy,  tilts 
the  figure  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George  into  a  salience  so  con- 
spicuous that  for  a  moment  one  is  tempted  to  confuse 
prominence  with  eminence,  and  to  mistake  the  slagheap 
of  upheaval  for  the  peaks  of  Olympus. 

But  how  is  it  that  this  politician  has  attained  even 
to  such  super-prominence? 

Another  incident  of  which  the  public  knows  nothing, 
helps  one,  I  think,  to  answer  this  question.  Early  in 


MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE  5 

the  struggle  to  get  munitions  for  our  soldiers  a  meeting 
of  all  the  principal  manufacturers  of  armaments  was 
held  in  Whitehall  with  the  object  of  persuading  them 
to  pool  their  trade  secrets.  For  a  long  time  this  meeting 
was  nothing  more  than  a  succession  of  blunt  speeches 
on  the  part  of  provincial  manufacturers,  showing  with 
an  unanswerable  commercial  logic  that  the  suggestion 
of  revealing  these  secrets  on  which  their  fortunes  de- 
pended was  beyond  the  bounds  of  reason.  All  the  inter- 
jected arguments  of  the  military  and  official  gentlemen 
representing  the  Government  were  easily  proved  by 
these  hard-headed  manufacturers,  responsible  to  their 
workpeople  and  shareholders  for  the  prosperity  of  their 
competing  undertakings,  to  be  impracticable  if  not 
preposterous. 

At  a  moment  when  the  proposal  of  the  Government 
seemed  lost,  Mr.  Lloyd  George  leant  forward  in  his 
chair,  very  pale,  very  quiet,  and  very  earnest.  "Gentle- 
men," he  said  in  a  voice  which  produced  an  extra- 
ordinary hush,  "  have  you  forgotten  that  your  sons,  at 
this  very  moment,  are  being  killed — killed  in  hundreds 
and  thousands?  They  are  being  killed  by  German 
guns  for  want  of  British  guns.  Your  sons,  your 
brothers — boys  at  the  dawn  of  manhood! — they  are 
being  wiped  out  of  life  in  thousands !  Gentlemen,  give 
me  guns.  Don't  think  of  your  trade  secrets.  Think 
of  your  children.  Help  them!  Give  me  those  guns." 

This  was  no  stage  acting.  His  voice  broke,  his  eyes 
filled  with  tears,  and  his  hand,  holding  a  piece  of  note- 


6     THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

paper  before  him,  shook  like  a  leaf.  There  was  not  a 
man  who  heard  him  whose  heart  was  not  touched,  and 
whose  humanity  was  not  quickened.  The  trade  secrets 
were  pooled.  The  supply  of  munitions  was  hastened. 

This  is  the  secret  of  his  power.  No  man  of  our  period, 
when  he  is  profoundly  moved,  and  when  he  permits  his 
genuine  emotion  to  carry  him  away,  can  utter  an  appeal 
to  conscience  with  anything  like  so  compelling  a  simplic- 
ity. His  failure  lies  in  a  growing  tendency  to  discard 
an  instinctive  emotionalism  for  a  calculated  astuteness 
which  too  often  attempts  to  hide  its  cunning  under  the 
garb  of  honest  sentiment.  His  intuitions  are  unrivalled : 
his  reasoning  powers  inconsiderable. 

When  Mr.  Lloyd  George  first  came  to  London  he 
shared  not  only  a  room  in  Gray's  Inn,  but  the  one  bed 
that  garret  contained  with  a  fellow-countryman.  They 
were  both  inconveniently  poor,  but  Mr.  Lloyd  George 
the  poorer  in  this,  that  as  a  member  of  Parliament  his 
expenses  were  greater.  The  fellow-lodger,  who  after- 
wards became  private  secretary  to  one  of  Mr.  Lloyd 
George's  rivals,  has  told  me  that  no  public  speech  of 
Mr.  Lloyd  George  ever  equalled  in  pathos  and  power 
the  speeches  which  the  young  member  of  Parliament 
would  often  make  in  those  hungry  days,  seated  on  the 
edge  of  the  bed,  or  pacing  to  and  fro  in  the  room, 
speeches  lit  by  one  passion  and  directed  to  one  great 
object,  lit  by  the  passion  of  justice,  directed  to  the  libera- 
tion of  all  peoples  oppressed  by  every  form  of  tyranny. 

This  spirit  of  the  intuitional  reformer,  who  feels 


MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE  7 

cruelty  and  wrong  like  a  pain  in  his  own  blood,  is  still 
present  in  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  but  it  is  no  longer  the 
central  passion  of  his  life.  It  is,  rather,  an  aside :  as  it 
were  a  memory  that  revives  only  in  leisure  hours.  On 
several  occasions  he  has  spoken  to  me  of  the  sorrows 
and  sufferings  of  humanity  with  an  unmistakable 
sympathy.  I  remember  in  particular  one  occasion  on 
which  he  told  me  the  story  of  his  boyhood:  it  was  a 
moving  narrative,  for  never  once  did  he  refer  to  his  own 
personal  deprivations,  never  once  express  regret  for  his 
own  loss  of  powerful  encouragements  in  the  important 
years  of  boyhood.  The  story  was  the  story  of  his 
widowed  mother  and  of  her  heroic  struggle,  keeping 
house  for  her  shoemaking  brother-in-law  on  the  little 
money  earned  by  the  old  bachelor's  village  cobbling, 
to  save  sixpence  a  week — sixpence  to  be  gratefully 
returned  to  him  on  Saturday  night.  "That  is  the  life 
of  the  poor!"  he  exclaimed  earnestly.  Then  he  added 
with  bitterness,  "And  when  I  try  to  give  them  five 
shillings  a  week  in  their  old  age  I  am  called  the  'Cad  of 
the  Cabinet'!" 

Nothing  in  his  life  is  finer  than  the  struggle  he  waged 
with  the  Liberal  Cabinet  during  his  days  as  Chancellor 
of  the  Exchequer.  The  private  opposition  he  encoun- 
tered in  Downing  Street,  the  hatred  and  contempt  of 
some  of  his  Liberal  colleagues,  was  exceeded  on  the 
other  side  of  politics  only  in  the  violent  mind  of  Sir 
Edward  Carson.  Even  the  gentle  John  Morley  was 
troubled  by  his  hot  insistences.  ' '  I  had  better  go, ' '  he 


8     THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

said  to  Mr.  Lloyd  George;  "I  am  getting  old:  I  have 
nothing  now  for  you  but  criticism."  To  which  the 
other  replied,  "Lord  Morley,  I  would  sooner  have  your 
criticism  than  the  praise  of  any  man  living" — a  per- 
fectly sincere  remark,  sincere,  I  mean,  with  the  emotion- 
alism of  the  moment.  His  schemes  were  disordered  and 
crude;  nevertheless  the  spirit  that  informed  them  was 
like  a  new  birth  in  the  politics  of  the  whole  world. 
A  friend  of  mine  told  me  that  he  had  seen  pictures  of 
Mr.  Lloyd  George  on  the  walls  of  peasants'  houses  in  the 
remotest  villages  of  Russia. 

But  those  days  have  departed  and  taken  with  them 
the  fire  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  passion.  The  laboured 
peroration  about  the  hills  of  his  ancestors,  repeated  to 
the  point  of  the  ridiculous,  is  all  now  left  of  that  fervid 
period.  He  has  ceased  to  be  a  prophet.  Surrounded 
by  second-rate  people,  and  choosing  for  his  intimate 
friends  mainly  the  new  rich,  and  now  thoroughly  liking 
the  game  of  politics  for  its  amusing  adventure,  he 
has  retained  little  of  his  original  genius  except  its 
quickness. 

His  intuitions  are  amazing.  He  astonished  great 
soldiers  in  the  war  by  his  premonstrations.  Lord 
Milner,  a  cool  critic,  would  sit  by  the  sofa  of  the  dying 
Dr.  Jameson  telling  how  Mr.  Lloyd  George  was  right 
again  and  again  when  all  the  soldiers  were  wrong.  Lord 
Rhondda,  who  disliked  him  greatly  and  rather  despised 
him,  told  me  how  often  Mr.  Lloyd  George  put  heart 
into  a  Cabinet  that  was  really  trembling  on  the  edge  of 


MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE  9 

despair.  It  seems  true  that  he  never  once  doubted 
ultimate  victory,  and,  what  is  much  more  remarkable, 
never  once  failed  to  read  the  German's  mind. 

I  think  that  the  doom  that  has  fallen  upon  him 
comes  in  some  measure  from  the  amusement  he  takes  in 
his  mental  quickness,  and  the  reliance  he  is  sometimes 
apt  to  place  upon  it.  A  quick  mind  may  easily  be  a 
disorderly  mind.  Moreover  quickness  is  not  one  of 
the  great  qualities.  It  is  indeed  seldom  a  partner  with 
virtue.  Morality  appears  on  the  whole  to  get  along 
better  without  it.  According  to  Landor,  it  is  the 
talent  most  open  to  suspicion : 

Quickness  is  among  the  least  of  the  mind's  properties, 
and  belongs  to  her  in  almost  her  lowest  state :  nay,  it  doth 
not  abandon  her  when  she  is  driven  from  her  home,  when 
she  is  wandering  and  insane.  The  mad  often  retain  it ;  the 
liar  has  it ;  the  cheat  has  it :  we  find  it  on  the  racecourse  and 
at  the  card-table :  education  does  not  give  it,  and  reflection 
takes  away  from  it. 

When  we  consider  what  Mr.  Lloyd  George  might 
have  done  with  the  fortunes  of  humanity  we  are  able 
to  see  how  great  is  his  distance  from  the  heights  of 
moral  grandeur. 

He  entered  the  war  with  genuine  passion.  He  swept 
thousands  of  hesitating  minds  into  those  dreadful  fur- 
naces by  the  force  of  that  passion.  From  the  first  no 
man  in  the  world  sounded  so  ringing  a  trumpet  note  of 
moral  indignation  and  moral  aspiration.  Examine  his 
earlier  speeches  and  in  all  of  them  you  will  find  that  his 


io    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

passion  to  destroy  Prussian  militarism  was  his  passion 
to  recreate  civilization  on  the  foundations  of  morality  and 
religion.  He  was  Peace  with  a  sword.  Germany  had 
not  so  much  attempted  to  drag  mankind  back  to  bar- 
barism as  opened  a  gate  through  which  mankind  might 
march  to  the  promised  land.  Lord  Morley  was  almost 
breaking  his  heart  with  despair,  and  to  this  day  regards 
Great  Britain's  entrance  into  the  war  as  a  mistake.  Sir 
Edward  Grey  was  agonizing  to  avert  war;  but  Mr. 
Lloyd  George  was  among  the  first  to  see  this  war  as  the 
opportunity  of  a  nobler  civilization.  Destroy  German 
militarism,  shatter  the  Prussian  tradition,  sweep  away 
dynastic  autocracies,  and  what  a  world  would  result  for 
labouring  humanity ! 

This  was  1914.  But  soon  after  the  great  struggle 
had  begun  the  note  changed.  Hatred  of  Germany  and 
fear  for  our  Allies'  steadfastness  occupied  the  foremost 
place  in  his  mind.  Victory  was  the  objective  and  his 
definition  of  victory  was  borrowed  from  the  prize-ring. 
A  better  world  had  to  wait.  He  became  more  and  more 
reckless.  There  was  a  time  when  his  indignation  against 
Lord  Kitchener  was  almost  uncontrollable.  For  Mr. 
Asquith  he  never  entertained  this  violent  feeling,  but 
gradually  lost  patience  with  him,  and  only  decided  that 
he  must  go  when  procrastination  appeared  to  jeopardize 
"a  knock-out  blow." 

Anyone  who  questioned  the  cost  of  the  war  was  a 
timid  soul.  What  did  it  matter  what  the  war  cost  so 
long  as  victory  was  won  ?  Anyone  who  questioned  the 


MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE  II 

utter  recklessness  which  characterized  the  Ministry  of 
Munitions  was  a  mere  fault-finder.  I  spoke  to  him  once 
of  the  unrest  in  factories,  where  boys  could  earn  £15  and 
£16  a  week  by  merely  watching  a  machine  they  knew 
nothing  about,  while  the  skilled  foremen,  who  alone 
could  put  those  machines  right,  and  who  actually 
invented  new  tools  to  make  the  new  machines  of  the 
inventors,  were  earning  only  the  fixed  wage  of  fifty 
shillings  a  week.  I  thought  this  arrangement  made  for 
unrest  and  must  prove  dangerous  after  the  war.  So 
eager,  so  hot  was  his  mind  on  the  end,  that  he  missed 
the  whole  point  of  my  remark.  ' '  What  does  it  matter, ' ' 
he  exclaimed  impatiently,  "what  we  pay  those  boys 
as  long  as  we  win  the  war?" 

And  the  end  of  it  was  the  humiliation  of  the  General 
Election  in  1918.  Where  was  the  new  world,  then? 
He  was  conscious  only  of  Lord  Northcliffe's  menace. 
Germany  must  pay  and  the  Kaiser  must  be  tried! 
There  was  no  trumpet  note  in  those  days,  and  there  has 
been  no  trumpet  note  since.  Imagine  how  Gladstone 
would  have  appealed  to  the  conscience  of  his  country- 
men !  Was  there  ever  a  greater  opportunity  in  states- 
manship? After  a  victory  so  tremendous,  was  there 
any  demand  on  the  generosity  of  men's  souls  which 
would  not  gladly  have  been  granted  ?  The  long  struggle 
between  capital  and  labour,  which  tears  every  state  in 
two,  might  have  been  ended:  the  heroism  and  self- 
sacrifice  of  the  war  might  have  been  carried  forward 
to  the  labours  of  reconstruction :  the  wounds  of  Europe 


12    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

might  have  been  healed  by  the  charities  of  God  almost 
to  the  transfiguration  of  humanity. 

Germany  must  pay  for  the  war! — and  he  knew  that 
by  no  possible  means  could  Germany  be  made  to  pay 
that  vast  account  without  the  gravest  danger  of  unem- 
ployment here  and  Bolshevism  in  Central  Europe! 
The  Kaiser  must  be  tried! — and  he  knew  that  the 
Kaiser  never  would  be  tried ! 

Millennium  dipped  below  the  horizon,  and  the  child's 
riding-whip  which  Lord  Northcliffe  cracks  when  he  is 
overtaken  by  a  fit  of  Napoleonic  indigestion  assumed 
for  the  Prime  Minister  the  proportions  of  the  Damo- 
clesian  sword.  He  numbered  himself  among  the 
Tououpinambos,  those  people  who  "have  no  name  for 
God  and  believe  that  they  will  get  into  Paradise  by 
practising  revenge  and  eating  up  their  enemies." 

I  can  see  nothing  sinister  in  what  some  people  regard 
as  his  plots  against  those  who  disagree  with  him.  He 
tries,  first  of  all,  to  win  them  to  his  way  of  thinking :  if 
he  fails,  and  if  they  still  persist  in  attacking  him,  he 
proceeds  to  destroy  them.  It  is  all  part  of  life's  battle ! 
But  one  would  rather  that  the  Prime  Minister  of  Great 
Britain  was  less  mixed  up  in  journalism,  less  afraid  of 
journalism,  and  less  occupied,  however  indirectly,  in 
effecting,  or  striving  to  effect,  editorial  changes.  His 
conduct  in  the  last  months  of  the  war  and  during  the 
election  of  1918  was  not  only  unworthy  of  his  position 
but  marked  him  definitely  as  a  small  man.  He  won 
the  election,  but  he  lost  the  world. 


MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE  13 

It  is  a  great  thing  to  have  won  the  war,  but  to  have 
won  it  only  at  the  cost  of  more  wars  to  come,  and  with 
the  domestic  problems  of  statesmanship  multiplied 
and  intensified  to  a  degree  of  the  gravest  danger,  this 
is  an  achievement  which  cannot  move  the  lasting  admira- 
tion of  the  human  race. 

The  truth  is  that  Mr.  Lloyd  George  has  gradually 
lost  in  the  world  of  political  makeshift  his  original 
enthusiasm  for  righteousness.  He  is  not  a  bad  man  to 
the  exclusion  of  goodness ;  but  he  is  not  a  good  man  to 
the  exclusion  of  badness.  A  woman  who  knows  him 
well  once  described  him  to  me  in  these  words:  "He 
is  clever,  and  he  is  stupid;  truthful  and  untruthful; 
pure  and  impure;  good  and  wicked;  wonderful  and 
commonplace :  in  a  word,  he  is  everything. ' '  I  am  quite 
sure  that  he  is  perfectly  sincere  when  he  speaks  of  high 
aims  and  pure  ambition ;  but  I  am  equally  sure  that  it 
is  a  relief  to  him  to  speak  with  amusement  of  trickery, 
cleverness,  and  the  tolerances  or  the  cynicisms  of 
worldliness. 

Something  of  the  inward  man  may  be  seen  in  the 
outward.  Mr.  Lloyd  George — I  hope  I  may  be  par- 
doned by  the  importance  and  interest  of  the  subject 
for  pointing  it  out — is  curiously  formed.  His  head  is 
unusually  large,  and  his  broad  shoulders  and  deep  chest 
admirably  match  his  quite  noble  head;  but  below  the 
waist  he  appears  to  dwindle  away,  his  legs  seeming  to 
bend  under  the  weight  of  his  body,  so  that  he  waddles 
rather  than  walks,  moving  with  a  rolling  gait  which  is 


14    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

rather  like  a  seaman's.  He  is,  indeed,  a  giant  mounted 
on  a  dwarf's  legs. 

So  in  like  manner  one  may  see  in  him  a  soul  of  eagle 
force  striving  to  rise  above  the  earth  on  sparrow's 
wings. 

That  he  is  attractive  to  men  of  a  high  order  may  be 
seen  from  the  devotion  of  Mr.  Philip  Kerr;  that  he  is 
able  to  find  pleasure  in  a  far  lower  order  of  men  may 
be  seen  from  his  closer  friendships.  It  is  impossible 
to  imagine  Mr.  Gladstone  enjoying  the  society  of 
Mr.  Lloyd  George's  most  constant  companion  although 
that  gentleman  is  a  far  better  creature  than  the  cause 
of  his  fortunes;  and  one  doubts  if  Lord  Beaconsfield 
would  have  trusted  even  the  least  frank  of  his  private 
negotiations  to  some  of  the  men  who  enjoy  the  Prime 
Minister's  political  confidence.  Nor  can  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  retort  that  he  makes  use  of  all  kinds  of 
energy  to  get  his  work  done,  for  one  knows  very  well 
that  he  is  far  more  at  his  ease  with  these  third-rate 
people  than  with  people  of  a  higher  and  more 
intellectual  order.  For  culture  he  has  not  the  very 
least  of  predilections;  and  the  passion  of  morality  be- 
comes more  and  more  one  of  the  pious  memories  of  his 
immaturity. 

Dr.  Clifford  would  be  gladly,  even  beautifully,  wel- 
comed ;  but  after  an  hour  an  interruption  by  Sir  William 
Sutherland  would  be  a  delightful  relief. 

M.  Clemenceau  exclaimed  of  him,  lifting  up  amazed 
hands,  "I  have  never  met  so  ignorant  a  man  as  Lloyd 


MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE  15 

George!"  A  greater  wit  said  of  him,  "I  believe  Mr. 
Lloyd  George  can  read,  but  I  am  perfectly  certain  he 
never  does." 

I  detect  in  him  an  increasing  lethargy  both  of  mind 
and  body.  His  passion  for  the  platform,  which  was 
once  more  to  him  than  anything  else,  has  almost  gone. 
He  enjoys  well  enough  a  fight  when  he  is  in  it,  but  to 
get  him  into  a  fight  is  not  now  so  easy  as  his  hangers-on 
would  wish.  The  great  man  is  tired,  and,  after  all, 
evolution  is  not  to  be  hurried.  He  loves  his  arm- 
chair, and  he  loves  talking.  Nothing  pleases  him  for  a 
longer  spell  than  desultory  conversation  with  someone 
who  is  content  to  listen,  or  with  someone  who  brings 
news  of  electoral  chances.  Of  course  he  is  a  tired  man, 
but  his  fatigue  is  not  only  physical.  He  mounted  up 
in  youth  with  wings  like  an  eagle,  in  manhood  he  was 
able  to  run  without  weariness,  but  the  first  years  of  age 
find  him  unable  to  walk  without  f  aintness — the  supreme 
test  of  character.  If  he  had  been  able  to  keep  the  wings 
of  his  youth  I  think  he  might  have  been  almost  the 
greatest  man  of  British  history.  But  luxury  has 
invaded,  and  cynicism;  and  now  a  cigar  in  the  depths 
of  an  easy-chair,  with  Miss  Megan  Lloyd  George  on  the 
arm,  and  a  clever  politician  on  the  opposite  side  of  the 
hearth,  this  is  pleasanter  than  any  poetic  vapourings 
about  the  millennium. 

If  only  he  could  rise  from  that  destroying  chair,  if 
only  he  could  fling  off  his  vulgar  friendships,  if  only  he 
could  trust  himself  to  his  vision,  if  only  he  could  believe 


16    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

once  again  passionately  in  truth,  and  justice,  and  good- 
ness, and  the  soul  of  the  British  people ! 

One  wonders  if  the  angels  in  heaven  will  ever  forgive 
his  silence  at  a  time  when  the  famished  children  of 
Austria,  many  of  them  born  with  no  bones,  were  dy- 
ing like  flies  at  the  shrivelled  breasts  of  their  starving 
mothers.  One  wonders  if  the  historian  sixty  years 
hence  will  be  able  to  forgive  him  his  rebuff  to  the  first 
genuine  democratic  movement  in  Germany  during  the 
war.  His  responsibility  to  God  and  to  man  is  enormous 
beyond  reckoning.  Only  the  future  can  decide  his 
place  here  and  hereafter.  It  is  a  moral  universe,  and, 
sooner  or  later,  the  judgments  of  God  manifest  them- 
selves to  the  eyes  of  men. 

One  seems  to  see  in  him  an  illustrious  example  both 
of  the  value  and  perils  of  emotionalism.  What  power 
in  the  world  is  greater,  controlled  by  moral  principle? 
What  power  so  dangerous,  when  moral  earnestness 
ceases  to  inspire  the  feelings? 

Before  the  war  he  did  much  to  quicken  the  social 
conscience  throughout  the  world ;  at  the  outbreak  of  war 
he  was  the  very  voice  of  moral  indignation ;  and  during 
the  war  he  was  the  spirit  of  victory;  for  all  this,  great  is 
our  debt  to  him.  But  he  took  upon  his  shoulders  a 
responsibility  which  was  nothing  less  than  the  future  of 
civilization,  and  here  he  trusted  not  to  vision  and  con- 
science but  to  compromise,  makeshift,  patches,  and  the 
future  of  civilization  is  still  dark  indeed. 

This  I  hope  may  be  said  on  his  behalf  when  he  stands 


MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE  17 

at  the  bar  of  history,  that  the  cause  of  his  failure  to  serve 
the  world  as  he  might  have  done,  as  Gladstone  surely 
would  have  done,  was  due  rather  to  a  vulgarity  of  mind 
for  which  he  was  not  wholly  responsible  than  to  any 
deliberate  choice  of  a  cynical  partnership  with  the 
powers  of  darkness. 


LORD  GARNOGK 


LORD  CARNOCK,  iST  BARON 
(ARTHUR  NICOLSON,  iiTH  BART.) 

Born,  1849.  Educ.:  Rugby  and  Oxford;  in  Foreign  Office,  1870-74; 
Secretary  to  Earl  Granville,  1872-74;  Embassy  at  Berlin,  1874-76;  at 
Pekin,  1876-78;  Charge1,  Athens,  1884-85;  Teheran,  1885-88;  Consul- 
General,  Budapest,  1888-93;  Embassy,  Constantinople,  1894;  Minister, 
Morocco,  1895-1904;  Ambassador,  Madrid,  1904-5;  Ambassador, 
Russia,  1905-10;  Under  Secretary  for  Foreign  Affairs,  1910-16.  Author 
of  the  History  of  the  German  Constitution,  1873. 


LORD   CARNOCK 


u.  &  u. 


CHAPTER  II 
LORD  CARNOCK 

"  Usually  the  greatest  boasters  are  the  smallest  workers.  The  deep  rivers 
pay  a  larger  tribute  to  the  sea  than  shallow  brooks,  and  yet  empty  themselves 
with  less  noise." — SECKKR. 

ONE  evening  in  London  I  mentioned  to  a  man  well 
versed  in  foreign  affairs  that  I  was  that  night  meeting 
Lord  Carnock  at  dinner.  "Ah!"  he  exclaimed,  "the 
man  who  made  the  war." 

I  mentioned  this  remark  to  Lord  Carnock.  He 
smiled  and  made  answer,  "What  charming  nonsense!" 
I  asked  him  what  he  thought  was  in  my  friend's  mind. 
"Oh,  I  see  what  he  meant,"  was  the  answer;  "but  it  is  a 
wild  mind  that  would  say  any  one  man  made  the  war." 
Later,  after  some  remarks  which  I  do  not  feel  myself 
at  liberty  to  repeat,  he  said :  "Fifty  years  hence  I  think 
a  historian  will  find  it  far  more  difficult  than  we  do  now 
to  decide  who  made  the  war." 

If  Lord  Carnock  were  to  write  his  memoirs,  not  only 
would  that  volume  help  the  historian  to  follow  the 
immediate  causes  of  the  war  to  one  intelligible  origin, 
but  it  would  also  afford  the  people  of  England  an 
opportunity  of  seeing  the  conspicuous  difference  be- 

21 


22    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

tween  a  statesman  of  the  old  school  and  a  politician  of 
these  latter  days. 

When  I  think  of  this  most  amiable  and  cultivated 
person,  and  compare  his  way  of  looking  at  the  evolution 
of  human  life  with  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  way  of  reading 
the  political  heavens,  a  sentence  in  Bagehot's  essay  on 
Charles  Dickens  comes  into  my  mind :  "There  is  nothing 
less  like  the  great  lawyer,  acquainted  with  broad 
principles  and  applying  them  with  distinct  deduction, 
than  the  attorney's  clerk  who  catches  at  small  points 
like  a  dog  biting  at  flies." 

No  one  could  be  less  like  the  popular  politician  of  our 
very  noisy  days  than  this  slight  and  gentle  person  whose 
refinement  of  mind  reveals  itself  in  a  face  almost  ascetic, 
whose  intelligence  is  of  a  wide,  comprehensive,  and 
reflecting  order,  and  whose  manner  is  certainly  the  last 
thing  in  the  world  that  would  recommend  itself  to  the 
mind  of  an  advertising  agent.  But  there  is  no  living 
politician  who  watched  so  intelligently  the  long  begin- 
nings of  the  war  or  knew  so  certainly  in  the  days  of 
tension  that  war  had  come,  as  this  modest  and  gracious 
gentleman  whose  devotion  to  principle  and  whose  quiet 
faith  in  the  power  of  simple  honour  had  outwitted 
the  chaotic  policy  and  the  makeshift  diplomacy  of  the 
German  long  before  the  autumn  of  1914. 

This  may  be  said  without  revealing  any  State  secret 
or  breaking  any  private  confidence: 

As  Sir  Arthur  Nicolson,  our  Ambassador  at  St. 
Petersburg,  Lord  Carnock  won  for  England,  as  no  other 


LORD  CARNOCK  23 

man  had  done  before  him,  the  love  of  Russia.  The 
rulers  of  Russia  trusted  him.  He  was  their  friend  in  a 
darkness  which  had  begun  to  alarm  them,  a  darkness 
which  made  them  conscious  of  their  country's  weakness, 
and  which  brought  to  their  ears  again  and  again  the 
rumbles  of  approaching  storm.  Lord  Carnock,  sincerely 
loving  these  people,  received  their  confidence  as  one 
friend  receives  the  confidence  of  another.  His  advice 
was  honourable  advice.  He  counselled  these  friends 
to  set  their  house  in  order  and  to  stand  firm  in  the 
conviction  of  their  strength.  Their  finances  were  a 
chaos,  their  ariry  was  disorganized;  let  them  begin  in 
those  quarters ;  let  them  bring  order  into  their  finances 
and  let  them  reorganize  their  army. 

While  he  was  at  St.  Petersburg,  after  a  wide  experi- 
ence in  other  countries,  he  twice  saw  Russia  humiliated 
by  Germany.  Twice  he  witnessed  the  agony  of  his 
Russian  friends  in  having  to  bow  before  the  threats  of 
Prussia.  Remember  that  the  rulers  of  Russia  in  those 
days  were  the  most  charming  and  cultivated  people  in 
the  world,  whereas  the  Prussian  as  a  diplomatist  was 
the  same  Prussian  whom,  even  as  an  ally  of  ours  in 
1815,  Croker  found  "very  insolent,  and  hardly  less 
offensive  to  the  English  than  to  the  French."1  The 

1  Croker  writes  from  Paris  of  a  visit  to  St.  Cloud,  where  he  found 
Bliicher  and  his  staff  in  possession:  "The  great  hall  was  a  common 
guard-house,  in  which  the  Prussians  were  drinking,  spitting,  smoking, 
and  sleeping  in  all  directions."  Denon  complained  greatly  of  the 
Prussians  and  said  he  was  "  malheureux  to  have  to  do  with  a  b£te  fe"roce, 
un  animal  inde"crottable,  le  Prince  Blucher." 


24    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

Russians  felt  those  humiliations  as  a  gentleman  would 
feel  the  bullying  of  an  upstart. 

Lord  Carnock  was  at  the  Foreign  Office  in  July, 
1914.  He  alone  knew  that  Russia  would  fight.  For 
the  rest  of  mankind,  certainly  for  the  German  Kaiser, 
it  was  to  be  another  bloodless  humiliation  of  the  Russian 
Bear.  Admiral  von  Tirpitz  wanted  war:  Bethmann- 
Hollweg  did  not.  The  great  majority  of  the  German 
people,  in  whom  a  genuine  fear  of  Russia  had  increased 
under  the  astute  propaganda  of  the  War  Party,  hoped 
that  the  sword  had  only  to  be  flashed  in  Russia's  face 
for  that  vast  barbarian  to  cower  once  again.  Few 
statesmen  in  Europe  thought  otherwise.  Sir  Edward 
Grey,  I  have  good  reason  to  think,  did  not  consider 
that  Russia  would  fight.  He  erred  with  that  great 
number  of  educated  Germans  who  thought  the  sword 
had  only  to  be  rattled  a  little  more  loudly  in  the  scab- 
bard for  Russia  to  weaken,  and  for  Germany  to  gain, 
without  cost,  the  supreme  object  of  her  policy — an 
increasing  ascendancy  in  the  Balkans.  But  this  time 
Russia  was  ready,  and  this  time  Lord  Carnock  knew 
Russia  would  fight.  I  am  not  sure  that  Lord  Carnock 
was  not  the  only  statesman  in  Europe  who  possessed 
this  knowledge — the  knowledge  on  which  everything 
hung. 

It  is  easy  for  thoughtless  people,  either  in  their  hatred 
or  love  of  Bolshevism,  to  forget  that  the  old  Russia 
saved  France  from  destruction  and  made  a  greater 
sacrifice  of  her  noblest  life  than  any  other  nation  in  the 


LORD  CARNOCK  25 

great  struggle.  The  first  Russian  armies,  composed  of 
the  very  flower  of  her  manhood,  fought  with  a  matchless 
heroism,  and,  so  fighting,  delivered  France  from  an 
instant  defeat. 

Lord  Carnock  may  justly  be  said  to  have  prepared 
Russia  for  this  ordeal — for  a  true  friend  helps  as  well  as 
gives  good  advice.  But  it  would  be  a  total  misjudg- 
ment  of  his  character  which  saw  in  this  great  work  a 
clever  stroke  of  diplomatic  skill. 

Lord  Carnock  was  inspired  by  a  moral  principle. 
He  saw  that  Russia  was  tempting  the  worst  passions  of 
Germany  by  her  weakness.  He  felt  this  weakness  to 
be  unworthy  of  a  country  whose  intellectual  achieve- 
ments were  so  great  as  Russia's.  He  had  no  enmity 
at  all  against  the  Germans.  He  saw  their  difficulties, 
but  regretted  the  spirit  in  which  they  were  attempting 
to  deal  with  those  difficulties — a  spirit  hateful  to  a 
nature  so  gentle  and  a  mind  so  honourable. 

He  had  studied  for  many  years  the  Balkan  problem. 
He  knew  that  as  Austria  weakened,  Germany  would 
more  and  more  feel  the  menace  of  Russia.  He  saw,  over 
and  over  again,  the  diplomacy  of  the  Germans  thrusting 
Austria  forward  to  a  paramount  position  in  the  Balkans, 
and  with  his  own  eyes  he  saw  the  Germans  in  Bulgaria 
and  Turkey  fastening  their  hold  upon  those  important 
countries.  If  Russia  weakened,  Germany  would  be 
master  of  the  world.  A  strong  Russia  might  alarm 
Germany  and  precipitate  a  conflict,  but  it  was  the 
world's  chief  fortress  against  Prussian  domination. 


26    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

For  the  sake  of  Russia  he  worked  for  Russia,  loving 
her  people  and  yet  seeing  the  dangers  of  the  Russian 
character;  hoping  that  a  self-respecting  Russia  might 
save  mankind  from  the  horrors  of  war  and,  if  war  came, 
the  worse  horrors  of  a  German  world-conquest.  This 
work  of  his,  which  helped  so  materially  to  save  the 
world,  was  done  with  clean  hands.  It  was  never  the 
work  of  a  war-monger.  No  foreigner  ever  exercised 
so  great  an  influence  in  Russia,  and  this  influence 
had  its  power  in  his  moral  nature.  I  had  this  from 
M.  Sazonoff  himself. 

Such  a  man  as  Lord  Carnock  could  not  make  any 
headway  in  English  political  life.  It  is  worth  our  while 
to  reflect  that  the  intelligence  of  such  men  is  lost  to  us 
in  our  home  government.  They  have  no  taste  for  the 
platform,  the  very  spirit  of  the  political  game  is  repel- 
lent to  them,  and  they  recoil  from  the  self-assertion 
which  appears  to  be  necessary  to  political  advancement 
in  the  House  of  Commons.  No  doubt  the  intelligence 
of  men  like  Mr.  J.  H.  Thomas  or  Mr.  William  Brace, 
certainly  of  Mr.  Clynes,  is  sufficient  for  the  crudest  of 
our  home  needs,  sufficient  for  the  daily  bread  of  our 
political  life;  but  who  can  doubt  that  English  politics 
would  be  lifted  into  a  higher  and  altogether  purer  region 
if  men  like  Lord  Carnock  were  at  the  head  of  things, 
to  provide  for  the  spirit  of  man  as  well  as  for  his 
stomach? 

More  and  more,  I  think,  gentlemen  will  stand  aloof 
from  politics — I  mean,  gentlemen  who  have  received  in 


LORD  CARNOCK  27 

their  blood  and  in  their  training  those  notions  of 
graciousness,  sweetness,  and  nobleness  which  flow  from 
centuries  of  piety  and  learning.  Only  here  and  there 
will  such  a  man  accept  the  odious  conditions  of  our 
public  life,  inspired  by  a  sense  of  duty,  and  prepared  to 
endure  the  intolerable  ugliness  and  dishonesty  of  politics 
for  the  sake  of  a  cause  which  moves  him  with  all  the 
force  of  a  great  affection.  But  on  the  whole  it  is  prob- 
able that  the  political  fortunes  of  this  great  and 
beautiful  country  are  committed  for  many  years  to 
hands  which  are  not  merely  over-rough  for  so  precious 
a  charge,  but  not  near  clean  enough  for  the  sacredness 
of  the  English  cause. 

Only  by  indirect  action,  only  by  a  much  more  faithful 
energy  on  the  part  of  Aristocracy  and  the  Church,  and 
a  far  nobler  realization  of  its  responsibilities  by  the 
Press,  can  the  ancient  spirit  of  England  make  itself  felt 
in  the  sordid  lists  of  Westminster.  Till  then  he  who 
crows  loudest  will  rule  the  roost. 


LORD  FISHER 


BARON  FISHER,  ADMIRAL  OF  THE  FLEET 
(JOHN  ARBUTHNOT  FISHER) 

Born,  1841;  entered  Navy,  1854;  took  part  in  1860  in  the  Capture  of 
Canton  and  the  Peiho  Forts;  Crimean  War,  1855;  China  War,  1859-60; 
Egyptian  War  and  Bombardment  of  Alexandria,  1882;  Lord  of  the 
Admiralty,  1892-97;  Commander-in-Chief,  North  American  Station, 
1897-99;  Mediterranean  Station,  1899-02;  Commander-in-Chief,  1903- 
1904;  ist  Sea  Lord,  1904-10;  1914-15;  died,  1920. 


u.  &  u. 


BARON    FISHER 


CHAPTER  III 
LORD   FISHER 

"Look  for  a  tough  wedge  for  a  tough  log." 

PUBLIUS  SYRUS. 

No  man  I  have  met  ever  gave  me  so  authentic  a  feeling 
of  originality  as  this  dare-devil  of  genius,  this  pirate  of 
public  life,  who  more  than  any  other  Englishman 
saved  British  democracy  from  a  Prussian  domination. 

It  is  possible  to  regard  him  as  a  very  simple  soul 
mastered  by  one  tremendous  purpose  and  by  that  pur- 
pose exalted  to  a  most  valid  greatness.  If  this  purpose 
be  kept  steadily  in  mind,  one  may  indeed  see  in  Lord 
Fisher  something  quite  childlike.  At  any  rate  it  is 
only  when  the  overmastering  purpose  is  forgotten  that 
he  can  be  seen  with  the  eyes  of  his  enemies,  that  is  to 
say  as  a  monster,  a  scoundrel,  and  an  imbecile. 

He  was  asked  on  one  occasion  if  he  had  been  a  little 
unscrupulous  in  getting  his  way  at  the  Admiralty.  He 
replied  that  if  his  own  brother  had  got  in  front  of  him 
when  he  was  trying  to  do  something  for  England  he 
would  have  knocked  that  brother  down  and  walked 
over  his  body. 

Here  is  a  man,  let  us  be  quite  certain,  of  a  most 

31 


32    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

unusual  force,  a  man  conscious  in  himself  of  powers 
greater  than  the  kindest  could  discern  in  his  contempo- 
raries, a  man  possessed  by  a  daemon  of  inspiration. 
Fortunately  for  England  this  daemon  drove  him  in  one 
single  direction:  he  sought  the  safety,  honour,  and 
glory  of  Great  Britain.  If  his  contemporaries  had  been 
travelling  whole-heartedly  in  the  same  direction  I  have 
no  doubt  that  he  might  have  figured  in  the  annals  of 
the  Admiralty  as  something  of  a  saint.  But  unhappily 
many  of  his  associates  were  not  so  furiously  driven  in 
this  direction,  and  finding  his  urgings  inconvenient 
and  vexatious  they  resisted  him  to  the  point  of  exasper- 
ation: then  came  the  struggle,  and,  the  strong  man 
winning,  the  weaker  went  off  to  abuse  him,  and  not 
only  to  abuse  him,  but  to  vilify  him  and  to  plot  against 
him,  and  lay  many  snares  for  his  feet.  He  will  never 
now  be  numbered  among  the  saints,  but,  happily 
for  us,  he  was  not  destined  to  be  found  among  the 
martyrs. 

He  has  said  that  in  the  darkest  hours  of  his  struggle 
he  had  no  one  to  support  him  save  King  Edward. 
Society  was  against  him ;  half  the  Admiralty  was  crying 
for  his  blood;  the  politicians  wavered  from  one  side  to 
the  other;  only  the  King  stood  fast  and  bade  him  go 
on  with  a  good  heart.  When  he  emerged  from  this 
tremendous  struggle  his  hands  may  not  have  been  as 
clean  as  the  angels  could  have  wished;  but  the  British 
Navy  was  no  longer  scattered  over  the  pleasant  waters 
of  the  earth,  was  no  longer  thinking  chiefly  of  its  paint 


L®R®  FISHER  33 

and  brass,  was  no  longer  a  pretty  sight  from  Mediter- 
ranean or  Pacific  shores — it-^was  almost  the  dirtiest 
thing  to  be  seen  in  the  North  Sea,  and  quite  the  deadli- 
est thing  in  the  whole  world  as  regards  gunnery. 

This  was  Lord  Fisher's  superb  service.  He  foresaw 
and  he  prepared.  Not  merely  the  form  of  the  Fleet 
was  revolutionized  under  his  hand,  but  its  spirit.  The 
British  Navy  was  baptized  into  a  new  birth  with  the 
pea-soup  of  the  North  Sea. 

When  this  great  work  was  accomplished  he  ordered  a 
ship  to  be  built  which  should  put  the  Kiel  Canal  out  of 
business  for  many  years.  That  done,  and  while  the 
Germans  were  spending  the  marks  which  otherwise 
would  have  built  warships  in  widening  and  deepening 
this  channel  to  the  North  Sea,  Lord  Fisher  wrote  it 
down  that  war  with  Germany  would  come  in  1914,  and 
that  Captain  Jellicoe  would  be  England's  Nelson. 

From  that  moment  he  lost  something  of  the  hard  and 
almost  brutal  expression  which  had  given  so  formidable 
a  character  to  his  face.  He  gave  rein  to  his  natural 
humour.  He  let  himself  go;  quoted  more  freely  from 
the  Bible,  asserted  more  positively  that  the  English 
people  are  the  lost  tribes  of  Israel,  and  waited  for 
Armageddon  with  a  humorous  eye  on  the  perturbed 
face  of  Admiral  Tirpitz. 

In  July,  1914,  he  was  out  of  office.  A  telegram  came 
to  him  from  Mr.  Winston  Churchill,  First  Lord  of  the 
Admiralty,  requesting  to  see  him  urgently.  Lord 
Fisher  refused  to  see  him,  believing  that  Mr.  Church- 


34    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

ill  had  jockeyed  Mr.  Reginald  McKenna  out  of  the 
Admiralty — Mr.  McKenna  who  had  most  bravely,  nay 
heroically,  stood  by  the  naval  estimates  in  face  of 
strong  Cabinet  opposition.  On  this  ground  he  refused 
to  meet  Mr.  Churchill.  But  a  telegram  from  Mr. 
McKenna  followed,  urging  him  to  grant  this  interview, 
and  the  meeting  took  place,  a  private  meeting  away 
from  London.  Mr.  Churchill  informed  Lord  Fisher  of 
the  facts  of  the  European  situation,  and  asked  him  for 
advice.  The  facts  were  sufficient  to  convince  Lord 
Fisher  that  the  tug-o'-war  between  Germany  and 
England  had  begun.  He  told  Mr.  Churchill  that  he 
must  do  three  things,  and  do  them  all  by  telegram 
before  he  left  that  room:  he  must  mobilize  the  Fleet, 
he  must  buy  the  Dreadnoughts  building  for  Turkey, 
and  he  must  appoint  Admiral  Jellicoe  Commander-in- 
Chief  of  the  Grand  Fleet.  To  do  either  of  the  first  two 
was  a  serious  breach  of  Cabinet  discipline;  to  do  the 
last  was  to  offend  a  string  of  Admirals  senior  to  Admiral 
Jellicoe.  Mr.  Churchill  hesitated.  Lord  Fisher  in- 
sisted. "What  does  it  matter,"  he  said,  "whom  you 
offend? — the  fate  of  England  depends  on  you.  Does  it 
matter  if  they  shoot  you,  or  hang  you,  or  send  you  to 
the  Tower,  so  long  as  England  is  saved?"  And  Mr. 
Churchill  did  as  he  was  bidden — the  greatest  act  in  his 
life,  and  perhaps  one  of  the  most  courageous  acts  in 
the  history  of  statesmanship.  Lord  Fisher  said  after- 
wards, "You  may  not  like  Winston,  but  he  has  got  the 
heart  of  a  lion." 


LORD  FISHER  35 

Thus  was  England  saved,  and  Germany  doomed. 
Before  war  was  declared  the  British  Fleet  held  the  seas, 
and  in  command  of  that  Fleet  was  the  quickest  working 
brain  in  the  Navy. 

On  one  occasion,  during  the  dark  days  of  the  war,  I 
was  lunching  at  the  Admiralty  with  Lord  Fisher,  who 
had  then  been  recalled  to  office.  He  appeared  rather 
dismal,  and  to  divert  him  I  said,  "I've  got  some  good 
news  for  you — we  are  perfectly  safe  and  Germany  is 
beaten."  He  looked  up  from  his  plate  and  regarded 
me  with  lugubrious  eyes.  I  then  told  him  that  Lord 
Kitchener  had  been  down  at  Knole  with  the  Sackvilles 
and  had  spent  a  whole  day  in  taking  blotting-paper 
impressions  of  the  beautiful  mouldings  of  the  doors  for 
his  house  at  Broome.  "  Does  that  make  you  feel  safe?  " 
he  demanded;  and  then,  pointing  to  a  maidservant  at 
the  sideboard,  he  added,  "See  that  parlourmaid? — 
well,  she's  leaving;  yesterday  I  spent  two  hours  at  Mrs. 
Hunt's  registry  office  interviewing  parlourmaids.  Now, 
do  you  feel  safe?" 

His  return  to  the  Admiralty  brought  him  no  happi- 
ness— save  when  he  sent  Admiral  Sturdee  to  sea  to 
avenge  the  death  of  Admiral  Cradock.  He  was  per- 
haps too  insistent  on  victory,  a  crushing  and  over- 
whelming victory,  for  a  Fleet  on  which  hung  the  whole 
safety  of  the  Allies,  and  a  Fleet  which  had  experienced 
the  deadly  power  of  the  submarine.  He  was  certainly 
not  too  old  for  work.  To  the  last,  looking  as  if  he  was 
bowed  down  to  the  point  of  exhaustion  by  his  labours, 


36   THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

he  outworked  all  his  subordinates.  As  for  energy,  he 
would  have  hanged  I  know  not  how  many  admirals 
if  he  had  been  in  power  during  the  last  stages  of 
the  war. 

His  experience  of  Downing  Street  filled  him  up  to  the 
brim  with  contempt  for  politicians.  It  was  not  so 
much  their  want  of  brains  that  troubled  him,  but  their 
total  lack  of  character.  Only  here  and  there  did  he 
come  across  a  man  who  had  the  properties  of  leadership 
in  even  a  minor  degree :  for  the  most  part  they  had  no 
eyes  for  the  horizon  or  for  the  hills  whence  cometh 
man's  salvation ;  they  were  all  ears,  and  those  ears  were 
leaned  to  the  ground  to  catch  the  rumbles  of  political 
emergencies. 

To  find  men  at  the  head  of  so  great  a  nation  with  no 
courage  in  the  heart,  with  no  exaltation  of  captaincy  in 
the  soul,  without  even  the  decency  to  make  sacrifices 
for  principle,  made  him  bitterly  contemptuous.  At 
first  he  could  scarcely  bridle  his  rage,  but  as  years  went 
on  he  used  to  say  that  the  politicians  had  deepened 
his  faith  in  Providence.  God  was  surely  looking 
after  England  or  she  would  have  perished  years  agone. 
In  his  old  age  he  ceaselessly  quoted  the  lines  of  William 
Watson : 

"Time,  and  the  Ocean,  and  some  fostering  star 
In  high  cabal  have  made  us  what  we  are"; 

and  damned  the  politician  with  all  the  vigour  of  the  Old 
Testament  vernacular. 


LORD  FISHER  37 

I  have  often  listened  to  a  minister's  confidential 
gossip  about  Lord  Fisher;  nothing  in  these  interesting 
confidences  struck  me  so  much  as  the  self-satisfaction 
of  the  little  minister  in  treating  the  man  of  destiny  as  an 
amusing  lunatic. 


MR.  ASQUITH 


THE  RT.  HON.  HERBERT  HENRY  ASQUITH 

Born  at  Morley,  Yorkshire,  1852.  Educ.:  City  of  London  School; 
Balliol  College,  Oxford;  gained  ist  class,  Lit.  Hum.  1874;  Barrister 
Lincoln's  Inn,  1876;  Q.  C.  1890;  Home  Sec'y,  1892-95;  Ecclesiastical 
Commissioner,  1892-95;  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer,  1905-8;  Sec'y 
for  War,  1914;  ist  Lord  of  the  Treasury  and  Prime  Minister,  1908-16; 
LL.D.  Edinburgh,  Glasgow,  Cambridge,  Leeds,  St.  Andrews,  and 
Bristol. 


RT.    HON.    HERBERT    HENRY   ASQUITH 


U.  &D. 


CHAPTER  IV 
MR.   ASQUITH 

"Not  to  mention  loss  of  time,  the  tone  of  their  feelings  is  lowered:  they 
become  less  in  earnest  about  those  of  their  opinions  respecting  which  they 
must  remain  silent  in  the  society  they  frequent:  they  come  to  look  upon  their 
most  elevated  objects  as  unpractical,  or  at  least  too  remote  from  realization 
to  be  more  than  a  vision  or  a  theory:  and  if,  more  fortunate  than  most,  they 
retain  their  higher  principles  unimpaired,  yet  with  respect  to  the  persons 
and  affairs  of  their  own  day,  they  insensibly  adopt  the  modes  of  feeling  and 
judgment  in  which  they  can  hope  for  sympathy  from  the  company  they  keep" 
— JOHN  STUART  MILL. 

NOTHING  in  Mr.  Asquith's  career  is  more  striking  than 
his  fall  from  power :  it  was  as  if  a  pin  had  dropped. 

Great  men  do  not  at  any  time  fall  in  so  ignominious 
a  fashion,  much  less  when  the  fate  of  a  great  empire  is  in 
the  balance. 

The  truth  is  that  Mr.  Asquith  possesses  all  the 
appearance  of  greatness  but  few  of  its  elements.  He 
has  dignity  of  presence,  an  almost  unrivalled  mastery 
of  language,  a  trenchant  dialectic,  a  just  and  honourable 
mind;  but  he  is  entirely  without  creative  power  and 
has  outgrown  that  energy  of  moral  earnestness  which 
characterized  the  early  years  of  his  political  life. 

He  has  never  had  an  idea  of  his  own.  The  "diffused 
sagacity"  of  his  mind  is  derived  from  the  wisdom  of 
other  men.  He  is  a  cistern  and  not  a  fountain. 

41 


42    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

His  scholarship  has  made  no  difference  to  scholarship. 
His  moral  earnestness  has  made  no  difference  to  moral- 
ity. He  acquired  scholarship  by  rote,  politics  by 
association,  and  morality  by  tradition.  To  none  of 
these  things  did  he  bring  the  fire  of  original  passion. 
The  force  in  his  youth  was  ambition,  and  the  goal  of 
his  energy  was  success.  No  man  ever  laboured  harder 
to  judge  between  the  thoughts  of  conflicting  schools; 
few  men  so  earnest  for  success  ever  laboured  less  to 
think  for  themselves.  He  would  have  made  a  noble 
judge;  he  might  have  been  a  powerful  statesman;  he 
could  never  have  been  a  great  man  as  Mazzini,  Bis- 
marck, and  Gladstone  were  great  men. 

There  are  reasons  for  suspecting  his  moral  qualities. 
When  he  allowed  Lord  Haldane  to  resign  from  the 
Cabinet  at  the  shout  of  a  few  ignorant  journalists  he 
sacrificed  the  oldest  of  his  friends  to  political  exigencies. 
This  was  bad  enough ;  but  what  made  it  worse  was  the 
appearance  of  heroic  courage  he  assumed  in  paddling  to 
Lord  Haldane's  rescue  long  after  the  tide  of  abuse  had 
fallen.  During  the  time  he  should  have  spoken  to  the 
whole  nation,  during  the  time  he  should  have  been 
standing  sword  in  hand  at  the  side  of  his  friend,  he  was 
in  negotiation  with  Sir  Edward  Carson. 

It  is  a  mistake  to  say  that  he  brought  England 
into  the  war.  England  carried  Mr.  Asquith  into  the 
war.  The  way  in  which  politicians  speak  of  Mr. 
Asquith  as  having  "preserved  the  unity  of  the  nation" 
in  August,  1914,  is  index  enough  of  the  degraded  condi- 


MR.  ASQUITH  43 

tion  of  politics.  A  House  of  Commons  that  had  hesi- 
tated an  hour  after  the  invasion  of  Belgium  would 
have  been  swept  out  of  existence  by  the  wrath  and 
indignation  of  the  people.  Mr.  Asquith  was  the  voice 
of  England  in  that  great  moment  of  her  destiny,  a  great 
and  sonorous  voice,  but  by  no  means  her  heart.  He 
kept  faction  together  at  a  moment  when  it  was  least 
possible  for  it  to  break  apart;  but  he  did  not  lead  the 
nation  into  war.  It  was  largely  because  he  seemed  to 
lack  assurance  that  Lord  Haldane  was  sacrificed.  The 
Tories  felt  that  Mr.  Asquith  would  not  make  war 
whole-heartedly:  they  looked  about  for  a  scapegoat; 
Lord  Haldane  was  chosen  for  this  purpose  by  the 
stupidest  of  the  Tory  leaders;  and  the  bewildered 
Prime  Minister,  with  no  mind  of  his  own,  and  turning 
first  to  this  counsellor  and  then  to  that,  sacrificed  the 
most  intellectual  of  modern  War  Ministers,  called  Sir 
Edward  Carson,  to  his  side,  and  left  the  British  war 
machine  to  Lord  Kitchener. 

We  must  make  allowance  for  the  time.  No  minister 
in  our  lifetime  was  confronted  by  such  a  gigantic  menace. 
Moreover,  the  Cabinet  was  not  united.  Mr.  Asquith 
came  out  of  that  tremendous  ordeal  creditably,  but 
not,  I  think,  as  a  great  national  hero.  As  for  his  con- 
duct of  the  war,  it  was  dutiful,  painst  king,  dignified, 
wise;  but  it  lacked  the  impression  of  a  creative  original 
mind.  He  did  not  so  much  direct  policy  and  inspire 
a  nation  as  keep  a  Cabinet  together.  One  seemed  to 
see  in  him  the  decorative  chairman  of  a  board  of 


44    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

directors  rather  than  the  living  spirit  of  the  under- 
taking. 

When  the  historian  comes  to  inquire  into  the  trivial 
consequences  of  Mr.  Asquith's  fall  from  power  he  will 
be  forced,  I  think,  to  lift  that  veil  which  Mr.  Asquith 
has  so  jealously  drawn  across  the  privacy  of  his  domestic 
life.  For  although  he  ever  lacked  the  essentials  of 
greatness,  Mr.  Asquith  once  possessed  nearly  all  those 
qualities  which  make  for  powerful  leadership.  Indeed 
it  was  said  in  the  early  months  of  the  war  by  the  most 
able  of  his  political  opponents  that  it  passed  the  wit  of 
man  to  suggest  any  other  statesman  at  that  juncture 
for  the  office  of  Prime  Minister. 

His  judicial  temperament  helped  him  to  compose 
differences  and  to  find  a  workable  compromise.  His 
personal  character  won  the  respect  of  men  who  are 
easily  influenced  by  manner.  There  was  something 
about  him  superior  to  a  younger  generation  of  politi- 
cians— a  dignity,  a  reticence,  a  proud  and  solid  self- 
respect.  With  the  one  exception  of  Mr.  Alfred  Spender, 
a  man  of  honour  and  the  noblest  principles,  he  had  no 
acquaintance  with  journalism.  He  never  gave  anybody 
the  impression  of  being  an  office-seeker,  and  there  was 
no  one  in  Parliament  who  took  less  pains  to  secure 
popularity.  At  ;ve  all  things,  he  never  plotted  behind 
closed  doors;  never  descended  to  treason  against  a  rival. 

Search  as  men  may  among  the  records  of  his  public 
life  they  will  fail  to  discover  any  adequate  cause  of  his 
fall  from  power.  He  was  diligent  in  office;  he  took 


MR.  ASQUITH  45 

always  the  highest  advice  in  every  military  dispute; 
settled  the  chief  difficulty  at  the  War  Office  without 
offence  to  Lord  Kitchener;  he  gave  full  rein  to  the 
fiery  energy  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George;  he  was  in  earnest, 
but  he  was  never  excited;  he  was  beset  on  every  side, 
but  he  never  failed  to  maintain  the  best  traditions  of 
English  public  life ;  he  was  trusted  and  respected  by  all 
save  a  clique.  Even  in  the  humiliation  of  the  Paisley 
campaign  he  was  so  noble  a  figure  that  the  indulgence 
with  which  he  appeared  to  regard  the  rather  violent  aid 
of  a  witty  daughter  was  accepted  by  the  world  as 
touchingly  paternal — the  old  man  did  not  so  much  lean 
upon  the  arm  of  his  child  as  smile  upon  her  high-spirited 
antics. 

One  must  trespass  upon  the  jealously  guarded  private 
life  to  discover  the  true  cause  of  his  bewildering  collapse. 
Mr.  Asquith  surrendered  some  years  ago  the  rigid 
Puritanism  of  early  years  to  a  domestic  circle  which 
was  fatal  to  the  sources  of  his  original  power.  Anyone 
who  compares  the  photographs  of  Mr.  Asquith  before 
and  after  the  dawn  of  the  twentieth  century  may  see 
what  I  mean.  In  the  earlier  photographs  his  face  is 
keen,  alert,  powerful,  austere;  you  will  read  in  it  the 
rigidity  of  his  Nonconformist  upbringing,  the  serious- 
ness of  his  Puritan  inheritance,  all  the  moral  earnest- 
ness of  a  nobly  ambitious  character.  In  the  later 
photographs  one  is  struck  by  an  increasing  expression 
of  festivity,  not  by  any  means  that  beautiful  radiance  of 
the  human  spirit  which  in  another  man  was  said  to 


46   THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

make  his  face  at  the  age  of  seventy-two  ' '  a  thanksgiving 
for  his  former  life  and  a  love-letter  to  all  mankind,"  but 
rather  the  expression  of  a  mental  chuckle,  as  though  he 
had  suddenly  seen  something  to  laugh  at  in  the  very 
character  of  the  universe.  The  face  has  plumped  and 
reddened,  the  light-coloured  eye  has  acquired  a  twinkle, 
the  firm  mouth  has  relaxed  into  a  sportive  smile.  You 
can  imagine  him  now  capping  a  "mot"  or  laughing 
deeply  at  a  daring  jest;  but  you  cannot  imagine  him 
with  profound  and  reverend  anxiety  striving  like  a  giant 
to  make  right,  reason,  and  the  will  of  God  prevail. 

Like  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  his  supplanter,  he  has  lost 
the  earnestness  which  brought  him  to  the  seats  of  power. 
A  domestic  circle,  brilliant  with  the  modern  spirit  and 
much  occupied  in  sharpening  the  wits  with  epigram  and 
audacity,  has  proved  too  much  for  his  original  stoicism. 
He  has  found  recreation  in  the  modern  spirit.  After 
the  day's  work  there  has  been  nothing  so  diverting  for 
him  as  the  society  of  young  people ;  chatter  rather  than 
conversation  has  been  as  it  were  prescribed  for  him, 
and  when  he  should  have  been  thinking  or  sleeping  he 
has  been  playing  cards. 

It  is  possible  to  argue  that  this  complete  change  from 
the  worries  of  the  day's  work  has  been  right  and  proper, 
and  that  his  health  has  been  the  better  for  it ;  but  physi- 
cal well-being  can  be  secured  by  other  means,  and  no 
physical  well-being  is  worth  the  loss  of  moral  power. 
There  are  some  natures  to  whom  easy-going  means  a 
descent.  There  are  some  men,  and  those  the  strongest 


MR.  ASQUITH  47 

sons  of  nature,  for  whom  the  kindest  commandment  is, 
''Uphill  all  the  way." 

Mr.  Asquith,  both  by  inheritance  and  temperament, 
was  designed  for  a  strenuous  life,  a  strenuous  moral  life. 
He  was  never  intended  for  anything  in  the  nature  of  a 
fldneur.  If  he  had  followed  his  star,  if  he  had  rigorously 
pursued  the  path  marked  out  for  him  by  tradition  and 
his  own  earliest  propensities,  he  might  have  been  an 
unpleasant  person  for  a  young  ladies'  tea-party  and  an 
unsympathetic  person  to  a  gathering  of  decadent  artists; 
he  might  indeed  have  become  as  heavy  as  Cromwell  and 
as  inhuman  as  Milton ;  but  he  would  never  have  fallen 
from  Olympus  with  the  lightness  of  thistledown. 


LORD  NORTHGLIFFE 


LORD  NORTHCLIFFE,  FIRST  VISCOUNT 
(ALFRED  CHARLES  WILLIAM  HARMSWORTH) 

Born,  1865,  in  Dublin.  Educ.:  in  Trade  Schools;  trained  as  a  book- 
seller, and  worked  in  the  establishment  of  George  Newnes;  LL.D., 
Rochester  Univ.,  U.  S.  A.;  Proprietor  of  the  London  Times,  Daily 
Mail,  and  a  number  of  other  journals;  Cr.  Bart,  in  1904;  Viscount,  1917; 
Chairman  of  the  British  War  Mission  to  the  United  States,  1917;  Di- 
rector of  the  Aerial  Transport  Committee,  1917;  Director  of  Propaganda 
in  Enemy  Countries,  1918. 


LORD    NORTHCLIFFE 


u.  &u. 


CHAPTER  V 
LORD   NORTHCLIFFE 

"...  We  cannot  say  that  they  have  a  great  nature,  or  strong,  or  weak, 
or  light;  it  is  a  swift  and  imperious  imagination  which  reigns  with  sovereign 
power  over  all  their  beings,  which  subjugates  their  genius,  and  which 
prescribes  for  them  in  turn  those  fine  actions  and  those  faults,  those  heights 
and  those  littlenesses,  those  flights  of  enthusiasm  and  those  fits  of  disgust, 
which  we  are  wrong  in  charging  either  with  hypocrisy  or  madness" — 
VAUVENARGUES. 

A  GREAT  surgeon  tells  me  he  has  no  doubt  that  Carlyle 
suffered  all  his  life  from  a  duodenal  ulcer.  "One  may 
speculate,"  he  says,  "on  the  difference  there  would 
have  been  in  his  writings  if  he  had  undergone  the 
operation  which  to-day  is  quite  common." 

This  remark  occurs  to  me  when  I  think  about  Lord 
Northcliffe. 

There  is  something  wrong  with  his  health.  For  a 
season  he  is  almost  boyish  in  high  spirits,  not  only  a 
charming  and  a  most  considerate  host,  but  a  spirit 
animated  by  the  kindliest,  broadest,  and  cheerfullest 
sympathies.  Then  comes  a  period  of  darkness.  He 
seems  to  imagine  that  he  may  go  blind,  declares  that  he 
cannot  eat  this  and  that,  shuts  himself  up  from  his 
friends,  and  feels  the  whole  burden  of  the  world  pressing 
on  his  soul. 

51 


52    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

It  is  impossible  to  judge  him  as  one  would  judge  a 
perfectly  healthy  man. 

The  most  conspicuous  thing  in  his  character  is  its 
transilience.  One  is  aware  in  him  of  an  anacoluthic 
quality,  as  if  his  mind  suddenly  stopped  leaping  in  one 
direction  to  begin  jumping  in  a  quite  contrary  direction. 
It  cannot  be  said  that  his  mind  works  in  any  direction. 
It  is  not  a  trained  mind.  It  does  not  know  how  to  think 
and  cannot  support  the  burden  of  trying  to  think.  It 
springs  at  ideas  and  goes  off  with  them  in  haste  too 
great  for  reflection.  He  drops  these  ideas  when  he 
sees  an  excuse  for  another  leap.  Sequence  to  Lord 
Northcliffe  is  a  synonym  for  monotony.  He  has  no 
esprit  de  suite.  But  he  has  leaps  of  real  genius.  An 
admirable  title  for  his  biography  would  be,  "The  Fits 
and  Starts  of  a  Discontinuous  Soul."  There  is  some- 
thing of  St.  Vitus  in  his  psychology.  You  might  call 
him  the  Spring-Heeled  Jack  of  Journalism. 

A  story  told  of  one  of  his  journalists  illustrates  the 
difficulty  of  dealing  with  so  uncertain  a  person.  Lord 
Northcliffe  invited  this  journalist,  let  us  call  him  Mr. 
H.,  to  luncheon.  They  approached  the  lift  of  Carme- 
lite House,  and  Lord  Northcliffe  drew  back  to  let  his 
guest  enter  before  him — he  has  excellent  manners 
and,  when  he  is  a  host,  is  scrupulously  polite  to  the  least 
of  people  in  his  employment.  Mr.  H.  approached  the 
lift,  and  raising  his  hat  and  making  a  profound  bow  to 
the  boy  in  charge  of  it,  passed  in  before  Lord  North- 
cliffe. Nothing  was  said  during  the  descent.  On  leav- 


LORD  NORTHCLIFFE  53 

ing  the  lift  Mr.  H.  again  raised  his  hat  and  bowed  low 
to  the  boy.  When  they  were  out  of  earshot  Lord 
Northcliffe  remonstrated  with  him  on  his  behaviour. 
"You  shouldn't  joke,"  he  said,  "with  these  boys,  it 
makes  discipline  difficult."  "Joke!"  exclaimed  Mr. 
H.,  "good  heavens,  I  wasn't  joking;  how  do  I  know  that 
to-morrow  he  will  not  be  the  editor  of  the  Daily  Mail?" 

This  story  has  a  real  importance.  It  emphasizes  a 
remarkable  characteristic  of  Lord  Northclifle's  vari- 
ability. It  emphasizes  the  romantic  quality  of  his 
mind.  Nothing  would  please  him  more  than  to  dis- 
cover in  one  of  his  office  boys  an  editor  for  The  Times. 
His  own  life  has  given  him  almost  a  novelette's  passion 
for  romance.  He  lives  in  that  atmosphere.  Few  men 
I  have  known  are  so  free  from  snobbishness  or  so 
indifferent  to  the  petty  conventions  of  society.  The 
dull  life  of  the  world  is  hateful  to  him.  He  would 
make  not  only  the  journalism  of  the  suburbs  sensational, 
he  would  make  the  history  of  mankind  a  fairy-story. 

It  is  difficult  to  understand  his  power  in  the  world. 
He  is  not  the  great  organizer  that  people  suppose;  all 
the  organization  of  his  business  has  been  done  by  Lord 
Rothermere,  a  very  able  man  of  business ;  nor  is  he  the 
inspirational  genius  one  is  so  often  asked  to  believe. 
Mr.  Kennedy  Jones  is  largely  responsible  for  the 
journalistic  fortunes  of  Lord  Northcliffe. 

I  am  disposed  to  think  that  it  is  the  romantic  quality 
of  his  mind  which  is  the  source  of  his  power.  All  the 
men  about  him  are  unimaginative  realists.  He  is  the 


54    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

artist  in  command  of  the  commercial  mind,  the  poet 
flogging  dull  words  into  a  kind  of  wild  music.  Mr. 
Kennedy  Jones  could  have  started  any  of  his  papers, 
but  he  could  never  have  imparted  to  them  that  living 
spirit  of  the  unexpected  which  has  kept  them  so  effectu- 
ally from  dulness.  Carmelite  House  could  give  the 
news  of  the  world  without  Lord  Northcliffe's  help,  but 
without  his  passion  for  the  twists  and  turns  of  the  fairy- 
story  it  could  never  have  presented  that  news  so  that 
it  catches  the  attention  of  all  classes. 

I  have  never  been  conscious  of  greatness  in  Lord 
Northcliffe,  but  I  have  never  failed  to  feel  in  his  mind 
something  unusual  and  remarkable.  He  is  not  an 
impressive  person,  but  he  is  certainly  an  interesting 
person.  One  feels  that  he  has  preserved  by  some 
magic  of  temperament,  not  to  be  analyzed  by  the  most 
skilful  of  psychologists,  the  spirit  of  boyhood.  You 
may  notice  this  spirit  quite  visibly  in  his  face.  The 
years  leave  few  marks  on  his  handsome  countenance. 
He  loves  to  frown  and  depress  his  lips  before  the  camera, 
for,  like  a  child,  he  loves  to  play  at  being  somebody 
else,  and  somebody  else  with  him  is  Napoleon — I  am 
sure  that  he  chose  the  title  of  Northcliffe  so  that  he 
might  sign  his  notes  with  the  initial  N — but  when  he  is 
walking  in  a  garden,  dressed  in  white  flannels,  and 
looking  as  if  he  had  just  come  from  a  Turkish  bath,  he 
has  all  the  appearance  of  a  youth.  It  is  a  tragedy  that  a 
smile  so  agreeable  should  give  way  at  times  to  a  frown 
as  black  as  midnight;  that  the  freshness  of  his  com- 


LORD  NORTHCLIFFE  55 

plexion  should  yield  to  an  almost  jaundiced  yellow; 
and  that  the  fun  and  frolic  of  the  spirit  should  flee  away 
so  suddenly  and  for  such  long  periods  before  the  witch  of 
melancholy. 

Of  his  part  in  the  history  of  the  world  no  historian 
will  be  able  to  speak  with  unqualified  approval.  His 
political  purpose  from  beginning  to  end,  I  am  entirely 
convinced,  has  been  to  serve  what  he  conceives  to  be 
the  highest  interests  of  his  country.  I  regard  him  in 
the  matter  of  intention  as  one  of  the  most  honourable 
and  courageous  men  of  the  day.  But  he  is  reckless  in 
the  means  he  employs  to  achieve  his  ends.  I  should 
say  he  has  no  moral  scruples  in  a  fight,  none  at  all;  I 
doubt  very  much  if  he  ever  asks  himself  if  anything  is 
right  or  wrong.  I  should  say  that  he  has  only  one 
question  to  ask  of  fate  before  he  strips  for  a  fight — is 
this  thing  going  to  be  Success  or  Failure? 

In  many  matters  of  great  importance  he  has  been 
right,  so  right  that  we  are  apt  to  forget  the  number  of 
times  he  has  been  wrong.  Whether  he  may  not  be 
charged  in  some  measure  at  least  with  the  guilt  of  the 
war,  whether  he  is  not  responsible  for  the  great  bitter- 
ness of  international  feelings  which  characterized 
Europe  during  the  last  twenty  years,  is  a  question  that 
must  be  left  to  the  historian.  But  it  is  already  appar- 
ent that  for  want  of  balance  and  a  moral  continuity  in 
his  direction  of  policy  Lord  Northcliffe  has  done 
nothing  to  elevate  the  public  mind  and  much  to  degrade 
it.  He  has  jumped  from  sensation  to  sensation. 


56 

The  opportunity  for  a  fight  has  pleased  him  more  than 
the  object  of  the  fight  has  inspired  him.  He  has  never 
seen  in  the  great  body  of  English  public  opinion  a  spirit 
to  be  patiently  and  orderly  educated  towards  noble 
ideals,  but  rather  a  herd  to  be  stampeded  of  a  sudden 
in  the  direction  which  he  himself  has  as  suddenly  con- 
ceived to  be  the  direction  of  success. 

The  true  measure  of  his  shortcomings  may  be  best 
taken  by  seeing  how  a  man  exercising  such  enormous 
power,  power  repeated  day  by  day,  and  almost  at  every 
hour  of  the  day,  might  have  prepared  the  way  for  dis- 
armament and  peace,  might  have  modified  the  character 
of  modern  civilization,  might  have  made  ostentation 
look  like  a  crime,  might  have  brought  capital  and 
labour  into  a  sensible  partnership,  and  might  have 
given  to  the  moral  ideals  of  the  noblest  sons  of  men 
if  not  an  intellectual  impulse  at  least  a  convincing 
advertisement. 

The  moral  and  intellectual  condition  of  the  world,  a 
position  from  which  only  a  great  spiritual  palingenesis 
can  deliver  civilization,  is  a  charge  on  the  sheet  which 
Lord  Northcliffe  will  have  to  answer  at  the  seat  of 
judgment.  He  has  received  the  price  of  that  condition 
in  the  multitudinous  pence  of  the  people;  consciously 
or  unconsciously  he  has  traded  on  their  ignorance, 
ministered  to  their  vulgarities,  and  inflamed  the  lowest 
and  most  corrupting  of  their  passions :  if  they  had  had 
another  guide  his  purse  would  be  empty. 

All  the  same*  it  is  the  greatest  mistake  for  his  enemies 


LORD  NORTHCLIFFE  57 

to  declare  that  he  is  nothing  better  than  a  cynical  egoist 
trading  on  the  enormous  ignorance  of  the  English 
middle-classes.  He  is  a  boy,  full  of  adventure,  full  of 
romance,  and  full  of  whims,  seeing  life  as  the  finest 
fairy-tale  in  the  world,  and  enjoying  every  incident 
that  comes  his  way,  whether  it  be  the  bitterest  and 
most  cruel  of  rights  or  the  opportunity  for  doing  some- 
one a  romantic  kindness. 

You  may  see  the  boyishness  of  his  nature  in  the 
devotion  with  which  he  threw  himself  first  into 
bicycling,  then  into  motoring,  and  then  into  flying. 
He  loves  machinery.  He  loves  every  game  which  in- 
volves physical  risk  and  makes  severe  demands  on 
courage.  His  love  of  England  is  not  his  love  of  her 
merchants  and  workmen,  but  his  love  of  her  masculine 
youth. 

He  has  been  generosity  itself  to  his  brothers,  with 
all  of  whom  he  does  not,  unfortunately,  get  on  as  well  as 
one  could  wish.  The  most  beautiful  thing  in  his  life 
is  the  love  he  cherishes  for  his  mother,  and  nothing 
delights  him  so  much  as  taking  away  her  breath  by 
acts  of  astonishing  devotion.  A  man  so  generous  and 
so  boyish  may  make  grave  mistakes,  but  he  cannot  be  a 
deliberately  bad  man. 


MR.  ARTHUR  BALFOUR 


THE  RT.  HON.  ARTHUR  JAMES  BALFOUR 

Born  in  Scotland  1848;  s.  of  Jas.  M.  Balfour  and  Lady  Blanche  Cecil; 
nephew  of  the  late  Marquis  of  Salisbury  and  therefore  ist  cousin  to  the 
present  Marquis,  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  and  Lord  Hugh  Cecil.  Educ.: 
Eton  and  Trinity  Coll.,  Cambridge;  LL.D.  Edinburgh,  St.  Andrews, 
Cambridge,  Dublin,  Glasgow,  Manchester,  Liverpool,  Birmingham, 
Bristol,  Sheffield,  Columbia  (New  York);  D.C.L.  Oxford.  M.P.  for 
Hertford,  1874-85;  Private  Sec'y  to  his  uncle,  the  late  Marquis  of  Salis- 
bury, 1878-80;  served  on  Mission  to  Berlin  with  Salisbury  and  Beacons- 
field,  1878;  Privy  Councillor,  1885;  President  of  Local  Government 
Board,  1885-86;  Sec'y  for  Scotland,  1886-87;  Lord  Rector,  St.  Andrews, 
1886;  Sec'y  for  Ireland,  1887-91;  Lord  Rector,  Glasgow,  1890;  Chancel- 
lor of  Edinburgh  since  1891;  First  Lord  of  Treasury,  1891-92;  President 
British  Association,  1904;  Prime  Minister,  1902-1905;  Leader  of  the 
Commons,  1895-1906;  ist  Lord  of  the  Admiralty  1915-16;  Head  of 
British  Mission  to  America,  1917;  Author  of  a  series  of  philosophical  and 
economic  works. 


u.  &u. 


RT.    HON.   ARTHUR  JAMES    BALFOUR 


CHAPTER  VI 
MR.   ARTHUR  BALFOUR 

"A  sceptre  once  put  into  the  hand,  the  grip  is  instinctive;  and  he  who  is 
firmly  seated  in  authority  soon  learns  to  think  security  and  not  progress, 
the  highest  lesson  of  statecraft." — J.  R.  LOWELL. 

IN  one  of  the  Tales  Crabbe  introduces  to  us  a  young 
lady,  Arabella  by  name,  who  read  Berkeley,  Bacon, 
Hobbes,  and  Locke  and  was  such  a  prodigy  of  learning 
that  she  became  the  wonder  of  the  fair  town  in  which, 
as  he  tells  us,  she  shone  like  a  polished  brilliant.  From 
that  town  she  reaped,  and  to  that  town  she  gave, 
renown: 

And  strangers  coming,  all  were  taught  t'admire 
The  learned  Lady,  and  the  lofty  Spire. 

One  feels  that  in  Mr.  Balfour  there  is  something  of 
both  the  learned  Lady  and  the  lofty  Spire.  He  is  at 
once  spinsterish  and  architectural.  I  mean  that  he  is 
a  very  beautiful  object  to  look  at,  and  at  the  same  time  a 
frustrated  and  perverse  nature.  Moreover  his  learning 
partakes  of  a  drawing-room  character,  while  his  loftiness 
dwindles  away  to  a  point  which  affords  no  foothold  for 
the  sons  of  man.  One  may  look  up  to  him  now  and 
again,  but  a  constant  regard  would  be  rewarded  by 

6l 


62    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

nothing  more  serviceable  to  the  admirer  than  a  stiff 
neck.  He  points  upward  indeed,  but  to  follow  his 
direction  is  to  discover  only  the  void  of  etheric  vacancy. 
Like  his  learning,  which  may  astonish  the  simple,  but 
which  hardly  illuminates  the  student,  his  virtues  leave 
one  cold.  Someone  who  knows  him  well  said  to  me 
once,  "He  is  no  Sir  Galahad.  Week-ending  and 
London  society  have  deteriorated  his  fibre." 

He  began  life  well,  but  he  has  slackness  in  his  blood 
and  no  vital  enthusiasm  in  his  heart.  His  career  has 
been  a  descent.  He  has  taken  things — ethically  and 
industrially — easily,  too  easily. 

It  is  a  pity  that  Nature  forgot  to  bestow  upon  him 
those  domestic  motions  of  the  heart  which  humanize 
the  mind  and  beautify  character,  for  in  many  ways  he 
was  fitted  to  play  a  great  part  in  affairs  of  State  and 
with  real  emotion  in  his  nature  would  have  made  an 
ideal  leader  of  the  nation  during  the  struggle  with  Ger- 
many. He  is  a  conspicuous  example  of  the  value  of 
sensibility,  for  lacking  this  one  quality  he  has  entirely 
failed  to  reach  the  greatness  to  which  his  many  gifts 
entitled  him. 

Few  men  can  be  so  charming:  no  man  can  be  more 
impressive.  His  handsome  appearance,  his  genial 
manner,  his  distinguished  voice,  his  eagerness  and  play- 
fulness in  conversation,  all  contribute  to  an  impression 
of  personality  hardly  equalled  at  the  present  time.  He 
might  easily  pass  for  the  perfect  ideal  of  the  gentleman. 
In  a  certain  set  of  society  he  remains  to  this  day  a 


MR.  ARTHUR  BALFOUR  63 

veritable  prince  of  men.  And  his  tastes  are  pure,  and 
his  life  is  wholesome. 

A  lady  of  my  acquaintance  was  once  praising  to  its 
mother  a  robust  and  handsome  infant  who  could  boast 
a  near  relationship  with  Mr.  Arthur  Balfour.  "Yes," 
said  the  mother,  with  criticism  in  her  eyes  and  voice, 
"I  think  he  is  a  nice  child,  but  we  rather  fear  he  lacks 
the  Balfourian  manner."  Even  in  childhood! 

This  Balfourian  manner,  as  I  understand  it,  has  its 
roots  in  an  attitude  of  mind — an  attitude  of  convinced 
superiority  which  insists  in  the  first  place  on  complete 
detachment  from  the  enthusiasms  of  the  human  race, 
and  in  the  second  place  on  keeping  the  vulgar  world 
at  arm's  length. 

It  is  an  attitude  of  mind  which  a  critic  or  a  cynic 
might  be  justified  in  assuming,  for  it  is  the  attitude  of 
one  who  desires  rather  to  observe  the  world  than  to 
shoulder  any  of  its  burdens;  but  it  is  a  posture  of 
exceeding  danger  to  anyone  who  lacks  tenderness  or 
sympathy,  whatever  his  purpose  or  office  may  be,  for  it 
tends  to  breed  the  most  dangerous  of  all  intellectual 
vices,  that  spirit  of  self-satisfaction  which  Dostoievsky 
declares  to  be  the  infallible  mark  of  an  inferior  mind. 

To  Mr.  Arthur  Balfour  this  studied  attitude  of  aloof- 
ness has  been  fatal,  both  to  his  character  and  to  his 
career.  He  has  said  nothing,  written  nothing,  done 
nothing,  which  lives  in  the  heart  of  his  countrymen. 
To  look  back  upon  his  record  is  to  see  a  desert,  and  a 
desert  with  no  altar  and  with  no  monument,  without 


64    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

even  one  tomb  at  which  a  friend  might  weep.  One 
does  not  say  of  him,  "He  nearly  succeeded  there,"  or 
"What  a  tragedy  that  he  turned  from  this  to  take  up 
that";  one  does  not  feel  for  him  at  any  point  in  his 
career  as  one  feels  for  Mr.  George  Wyndham  or  even 
for  Lord  Randolph  Churchill;  from  its  outset  until 
now  that  career  stretches  before  our  eyes  in  a  flat  and 
uneventful  plain  of  successful  but  inglorious  and 
ineffective  self-seeking. 

There  is  one  signal  characteristic  of  the  Balfourian 
manner  which  is  worthy  of  remark.  It  is  an  assumption 
in  general  company  of  a  most  urbane,  nay,  even  a  most 
cordial  spirit.  I  have  heard  many  people  declare  at  a 
public  reception  that  he  is  the  most  gracious  of  men,  and 
seen  many  more  retire  from  shaking  his  hand  with  a 
flush  of  pride  on  their  faces  as  though  Royalty  had 
stooped  to  inquire  after  the  measles  of  their  youngest 
child.  Such  is  ever  the  effect  upon  vulgar  minds  of 
geniality  in  superiors :  they  love  to  be  stooped  to  from 
the  heights. 

But  this  heartiness  of  manner  is  of  the  moment  only, 
and  for  everybody;  it  manifests  itself  more  personally 
in  the  circle  of  his  intimates  and  is  irresistible  in  week- 
end parties;  but  it  disappears  when  Mr.  Balfour  retires 
into  the  shell  of  his  private  life  and  there  deals  with 
individuals,  particularly  with  dependents.  It  has  no 
more  to  do  with  his  spirit  than  his  tail-coat  and  his  white 
tie.  Its  remarkable  impression  comes  from  its 
unexpectedness;  its  effect  is  the  shock  of  surprise.  In 


MR.  ARTHUR  BALFOUR  65 

public  he  is  ready  to  shake  the  whole  world  by  the 
hand,  almost  to  pat  it  on  the  shoulder;  but  in  private 
he  is  careful  to  see  that  the  world  does  not  enter  even 
the  remotest  of  his  lodge  gates. 

"The  truth  about  Arthur  Balfour,"  said  George 
Wyndham,  "is  this:  he  knows  there's  been  one  ice-age, 
and  he  thinks  there's  going  to  be  another." 

Little  as  the  general  public  may  suspect  it,  the  charm- 
ing, gracious,  and  cultured  Mr.  Balfour  is  the  most 
egotistical  of  men,  and  a  man  who  would  make  almost 
any  sacrifice  to  remain  in  office.  It  costs  him  nothing 
to  serve  under  Mr.  Lloyd  George;  it  would  have  cost 
him  almost  his  life  to  be  out  of  office  during  a  period  so 
exciting  as  that  of  the  Great  War.  He  loves  office  more 
than  anything  this  world  can  offer;  neither  in  philo- 
sophy nor  music,  literature  nor  science,  has  he  ever 
been  able  to  find  rest  for  his  soul.  It  is  profoundly 
instructive  that  a  man  with  a  real  talent  for  the  noblest 
of  those  pursuits  which  make  solitude  desirable  and 
retirement  an  opportunity  should  be  so  restless  and  dis- 
satisfied, even  in  old  age,  outside  the  doors  of  public 
life. 

The  most  serious  effect  upon  his  character  of  this 
central  selfishness  may  be  seen  in  his  treatment  of 
George  Wyndham.  Mr.  Balfour  has  had  only  one 
friend  in  his  parliamentary  life,  Alfred  Lyttelton,  but 
George  Wyndham  came  nearer  to  his  affections  than 
any  other  man"  in  the  Unionist  Party,  and  was  at  one 
time  Mr.  Balfour's  devoted  admirer.  Nevertheless, 


66    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

in  the  hour  of  his  tragedy,  in  the  hour  which  broke  his 
heart  and  destroyed  his  career,  Mr.  Balfour,  who  should 
have  championed  him  against  the  wolves  of  the  Party, 
and  might,  I  verily  believe,  have  saved  both  him  and 
Ireland,  turned  away  his  face  and  rendered  homage  to 
political  opportunism.  Wyndham's  grave  and  the 
present  condition  of  Ireland  stand  as  sorrowful  remind- 
ers of  that  unworthy  act. 

Wyndham  was  by  no  means  a  first-rate  politician, 
but  he  was  a  sincere  man,  something  too  of  a  genius, 
and  I  think  there  was  genuine  inspiration  in  his  method 
of  solving  the  Irish  question. 

This  incident  reveals  in  Mr.  Balfour  a  capacity  for 
meanness  which  rather  darkens  his  good  qualities.  It 
prevents  one  from  believing  that  his  conduct  has  always 
been  guided  by  noble  and  disinterested  motives.  The 
historian  might  have  said  that  although  he  mistook 
astuteness  and  adroitness  in  parliamentary  debate  for 
statesmanship,  and  although  he  accomplished  nothing 
for  the  good  of  his  country,  he  yet  lent  a  certain  dignity 
and  nobleness  to  public  life  at  a  time  when  it  was 
besieged  by  new  forces  in  democracy  having  no  rever- 
ence for  tradition  and  little  respect  for  good  manners; 
but  when  the  full  truth  of  the  Wyndham  incident  is 
related  it  will  be  difficult  for  the  historian  to  avoid  a 
%  somewhat  harsh  judgment  on  Mr.  Balfour's  character. 

Nor  does  the  Wyndham  incident  stand  alone.     His 

treatment  of  Mr.  Ritchie  and  Lord  George  Hamilton 

^    was  very  bad.    Then  there  was  the  case  of  Joseph 


MR.  ARTHUR  BALFOUR  67 

Chamberlain,  who  had  good  reason  never  to  forgive 
him.  Some  day  Mr.  Asquith  (or  will  it  be  Mrs.  Asquith) 
may  tell  the  story  of  dealings  with  Mr.  Balfour  which 
were  not  of  a  handsome  character.  The  more  these 
things  are  revealed  the  worse  I  think  it  will  be  for  Mr. 
Balfour's  character. 

But  such  is  the  personal  effect  of  the  man  that  even 
those  whom  he  has  treated  badly  never  bring  any  public 
charge  against  him.  With  the  exception  of  Mr.  Asquith, 
and  Joseph  Chamberlain,  all  forgave  him,  and  even 
sought  to  fir  i  excuses  for  his  inexplicable  lapse.  But 
I  am  inclined  to  think  that  this  indicates  weakness  on 
the  part  of  the  victim  rather  than  grace  on  the  part  of 
the  victimizer. 

There  are  other  ways  in  which  his  lack  of  sensibility 
manifests  itself  in  an  unpleasant  fashion.  He  is  so  self- 
absorbed  that  he  appears  to  be  wholly  unaware  of  those 
who  minister  to  his  comfort.  Of  his  servants  he  never 
knows  the  least  detail,  not  even  their  names,  and  even 
a  devoted  secretary  who  has  served  him  faithfully  for 
many  years  may  find  himself  treated  almost  as  a 
stranger  in  a  moment  of  need.  I  fear  it  must  be  said 
that  in  financial  matters  Mr.  Balfour  is  as  close-fisted 
as  any  miser,  although  I  believe  that  this  meanness  has 
its  rise,  not  so  much  in  avariciousness  as  in  a  total 
incapacity  to  realize  the  importance  of  money  to  other 
people. 

It  has  been  said  that  the  whole  history  of  philo- 
sophical thought  is  an  attempt  to  separate  the  object 


68    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

and  the  subject.  Mr.  Balfour  appears  to  have  made 
this  separation  complete.  For  him  there  is  no  object. 
His  mind  has  embraced  his  subjective  self,  and  has  not 
merely  refused  the  fruitless  effort  of  attempting  to  stand 
outside  its  functions  in  order  to  perceive  its  own  per- 
ceptions, but,  abandoning  the  unperceived  perceptions 
and  the  inactive  activities  of  ultimate  reality,  it  has 
canonized  its  own  functions  and  deified  its  own  sub- 
jective universe.  So  complete,  indeed,  is  this 
separation  that  he  can  scarcely  be  called  selfish,  since 
for  him  there  exists  no  objective  field  for  i  ne  operation 
of  unselfishness. 

I  lament  this  self-absorption  of  Mr.  Balfour  as 
much  as  I  lament  in  his  cousin  Lord  Robert  Cecil  the 
lack  of  the  fighting  qualities  of  leadership.  To  no 
man  of  the  Unionist  Party  after  the  death  of  Lord 
Beaconsfield  and  Lord  Salisbury  have  more  hopeful 
opportunities  presented  themselves  for  creative  states- 
manship. He  might  have  settled  the  Irish  Question. 
He  might  have  avoided  the  Boer  War,  in  the  conduct  of 
which  he  behaved  with  real  nobleness  at  the  beginning. 
He  might  have  saved  Germany  from  her  own  war- 
mongers. In  any  case  he  might  have  led  the  Unionist 
Party  towards  construction  and  so  have  prevented 
the  slap-dash  methods  at  reform  set  going  by  Mr. 
Lloyd  George  after  a  long  and  irritating  period  of 
Tory  pottering.  For  few  men  in  modern  times  have 
exercised  so  great  a  fascination  over  that  curious  and 
easily  satisfied  body,  the  House  of  Commons,  and  no 


MR.  ARTHUR  BALFOUR  69 

man  in  the  public  life  of  our  times  has  enjoyed  a  more 
powerful  prestige  in  the  constituencies.  Indeed,  he 
stood  for  many  years  as  the  most  dignified  and  honour- 
able figure  in  the  public  life  of  Great  Britain,  and  his 
influence  in  politics  during  the  first  part  of  that  period 
was  without  serious  rivalry. 

It  must  not  be  forgotten,  too,  that  in  the  days  of 
"bloody  Balfour"  he  was  not  merely  chivalrous,  but 
even  Quixotic,  in  taking  upon  himself  the  mistakes 
and  misdoings  of  his  subordinates  in  Ireland.  He 
certainly  had  the  makings  of  a  chivalrous  figure,  and 
perhaps  even  a  great  man.  One  thinks  that  he  began 
his  descent  unconsciously,  and  that  carelessness  rather 
than  any  inherent  badness  led  gradually  to  an  egoism 
which  has  proved  fatal  to  his  powers  and  to  his  character. 

To  the  self-aborbed,  vision  is  impossible.  Mr.  Bal- 
four, unable  to  penetrate  the  future,  has  lived  from  day 
to  day,  enjoying  the  game  of  politics  for  the  fun  of  con- 
founding critics  and  managing  colleagues,  enjoying  too 
the  privilege  and  dignity  of  power,  but  never  once 
feeling  the  call  of  the  future,  or  experiencing  one  genuine 
desire  to  leave  the  world  better  than  he  found  it.  And 
now  he  ends  his  political  career  clinging  to  a  decorative 
office  under  the  leadership  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George. 

At  the  end  of  his  Gifford  Lectures,  after  an  argument 
which  induced  one  of  his  listeners  to  say  that  he  had 
a  stammer  in  his  thoughts,  Mr.  Balfour  announced  his 
faith  in  God.  One  may  recall  Pascal's  exclamation, 
' '  How  far  it  is  from  believing  in  God  to  loving  Him ! " 


70    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

I  have  always  thought  it  significant  of  his  true  nature 
that  Mr.  Balfour  should  be  one  of  the  worst  offenders 
in  that  unlovely  Front  Bench  habit  of  putting  his  feet 
up  on  the  Clerk's  table.  The  last  time  I  was  in  the 
House  of  Commons  Mr.  J.  H.  Thomas  was  lying  back 
on  the  Opposition  Front  Bench  with  his  legs  in  the 
air  and  his  muddy  boots  crossed  on  the  table.  The 
boorishness  of  this  attitude  struck  my  companion  very 
sharply.  But  I  pointed  out  to  him  that  the  difference 
between  Mr.  Thomas,  the  Labour  member,  and  Mr. 
Balfour,  the  great  gentleman,  was  merely  a  size  in 
boots. 


LORD  KITCHENER 


LORD  KITCHENER  OF  KHARTOUM 

Born,  1846;  entered  Army,  1866;  Colonel,  1899;  Burmah  Campaign, 
1891;  Viscount,  1914;  Baron,  1914;  Earl,  1914;  Sec'y  for  War,  1914; 
died,  1917. 


u.  &  u. 


LORD    KITCHENER 


CHAPTER  VII 
LORD  KITCHENER 

"/  never  knew  a  man  so  fixed  upon  doing  what  he  considered  his  duty." — 
CROKER  PAPERS. 

SOON  after  he  had  taken  his  chair  at  the  War  Office, 
Lord  Kitchener  received  a  call  from  Mr.  Lloyd  George. 
The  politician  had  come  to  urge  the  appointment  of 
denominational  chaplains  for  all  the  various  sects 
represented  in  the  British  Army. 

Lord  Kitchener  was  opposed  to  the  idea,  which 
seemed  to  him  irregular,  unnecessary,  and  expensive, 
involving  a  waste  of  transport,  rations,  and  clerks' 
labour.  But  Mr.  Lloyd  George  stuck  to  his  sectarian 
guns,  and  was  so  insistent,  especially  in  respect  of 
Presbyterians,  that  at  last  the  Secretary  of  State  for 
War  yielded  in  this  one  case.  He  took  up  his  pen 
rather  grudgingly  and  growled  out,  "Very  well:  you 
shall  have  a  Presbyterian."  Then  one  of  his  awkward 
smiles  broke  up  the  firmness  of  his  bucolic  face. 
"Let's  see,"  he  asked;  "Presbyterian? — how  do  you 
spellit?" 

This  was  one  of  his  earliest  adventures  with  politi- 
cians, and  he  ended  it  with  a  sly  cut  at  unorthodoxy. 

73 


74    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

A  little  later  came  another  political  experience  which 
afforded  him  real  insight  into  this  new  world  of  Party 
faction,  one  of  those  experiences  not  to  be  lightly 
dismissed  with  a  jest. 

He  discovered  at  the  War  Office  that  preparations 
had  been  made  for  just  such  an  emergency  as  had  now 
occurred.  The  thoughtfulness  and  thoroughness  of 
this  work  struck  him  with  surprise,  and  he  inquired  the 
name  of  its  author.  He  was  told  that  Lord  Haldane 
had  made  these  preparations.  "Haldane!"  he  ex- 
claimed; "but  isn't  he  the  man  who  is  being  attacked 
by  the  newspapers?" 

A  chivalrous  feeling  which  does  not  seem  to  have 
visited  the  bosoms  of  any  of  Lord  Haldane's  colleagues 
visited  the  bosom  of  this  honest  soldier.  Someone 
about  him  who  had  enjoyed  personal  relations  with  vari- 
ous editors  was  dispatched  to  one  of  the  most  offending 
editors  conducting  the  campaign  against  Lord  Haldane 
with  the  object  of  stopping  this  infamous  vendetta. 

"I  know  what  you  say  is  true,"  replied  this  editor, 
"and  I  regret  the  attack  as  much  as  Lord  Kitchener 
does;  but  I  have  received  my  orders  and  they  come 
from  so  important  a  quarter  that  I  dare  not  disobey 
them."  He  gave  Lord  Kitchener's  emissary  the  name 
of  a  much  respected  leader  of  the  Unionist  Party. 

Thus  early  in  his  career  at  the  War  Office  Lord 
Kitchener  learnt  that  the  spirit  of  the  public  school 
does  not  operate  in  Westminster  and  that  politics  are  a 
dirty  business. 


LORD  KITCHENER  75 

At  no  time  in  his  life  was  Lord  Kitchener  "a  race- 
horse amongst  cows,"  as  the  Greeks  put  it,  being, 
even  in  his  greatest  period,  of  a  slow,  heavy,  and 
laborious  turn  of  mind;  but  when  he  entered  Mr. 
Asquith's  Cabinet  he  was  at  least  an  honest  man 
amongst  lawyers.  He  was  a  great  man ;  wherever  he 
sat,  to  borrow  a  useful  phrase,  was  the  head  of  the 
table ;  but  this  greatness  of  his,  not  being  the  full  great- 
ness of  a  complete  man,  and  having  neither  the  support 
of  a  keen  intellect  nor  the  foundations  of  a  strong  moral 
character,  wilted  in  the  atmosphere  of  politics,  and  in 
the  end  left  him  with  little  but  the  frayed  cloak  of  his 
former  reputation. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  his  administration  of  the  War 
Office  was  not  a  success.  In  all  important  matters  of 
strategy  he  shifted  his  ground  from  obstinacy  to  sulki- 
ness,  yielding  where  he  should  not  have  yielded  at  all, 
and  yielding  grudgingly  where  to  yield  without  the 
whole  heart  was  fatal  to  success:  in  the  end  he  was 
among  the  drifters,  "something  between  a  hindrance 
and  a  help,"  and  the  efforts  to  get  rid  of  him  were 
perhaps  justified,  although  Mr.  Asquith's  policy  of 
curtailing  his  autocracy  on  the  occasions  when  he  was 

abroad  had  the  greater  wisdom. 

*~7 

I  shall  not  trouble  to  correct  the  popular  idea  of  Lord 

Kitchener's  character  beyond  saying  that  he  was  the  last 
man  in  the  world  to  be  called  a  machine,  and  that  he 
solemnly  distrusted  the  mechanism  of  all  organizations. 
He  was  first  and  last  an  out-and-out  individualist,  a 


76   THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

believer  in  men,  a  hater  of  all  systems.  As  Sir  Ian 
Hamilton  has  said,  wherever  he  saw  organization  his 
fjrst  instinct  was  to  smash  it.  I  think  his  autocracy 
at  the  War  Office  might  have  been  of  greater  service 
to  the  country  if  all  the  trained  thinkers  of  the  Army, 
that  small  body  of  brilliant  men,  had  not  been  in 
France.  Even  in  his  prime  Lord  Kitchener  was  the 
most  helpless  of  men  without  lieutenants  he  could 
trust  to  do  his  bidding  or  to  improve  upon  it  in  the 
doing. 

It  will  better  serve  the  main  purpose  of  this  book  to 
suggest  in  what  particulars  the  real  greatness  of  this 
once  glorious  and  finally  pathetic  figure  came  to  suffer 
shipwreck  at  the  hands  of  the  politicians. 

Lord  Kitchener's  greatness  was  the  indefinable 
greatness  of  personality.  He  was  not  a  clever  man. 
He  had  no  gifts  of  any  kind.  In  the  society  of  scholars 
he  was  mum  and  among  the  lovers  of  the  beautiful  he 
cut  an  awkward  figure.  At  certain  moments  he  had 
curious  flashes  of  inspiration,  but  they  came  at  long 
intervals  and  were  seldom  to  be  had  in  the  day  of 
drudgery,  when  his  mind  was  not  excited.  On  the 
whole  his  intelligence  was  of  a  dull  order,  plodding 
heavily  through  experience,  mapping  the  surface  of  life 
rather  than  penetrating  any  of  its  mysteries,  making 
slowly  quite  sure  of  one  or  two  things  rather  than 
grasping  the  whole  problem  at  a  stroke. 

But  there  was  one  movement  in  his  character  which 
developed  greatness  and  by  its  power  brought  him  to 


LORD  KITCHENER  77 

wonderful  success  and  great  honour;  this  was  a  deep, 
an  unquestioning,  a  religious  sense  of  duty. 

He  started  life  with  a  stubborn  ambition.  As  he 
went  along  he  felt  the  tightness  of  duty,  and  married 
his  ambition  to  this  Spartan  virtue.  He  remained  in 
most  respects  as  selfish  a  man  as  ever  lived,  as  selfish 
as  a  greedy  schoolboy;  nevertheless  by  the  power  of 
his  single  virtue,  to  which  he  was  faithful  up  to  his 
last  moments  on  this  earth,  he  was  able  to  sacrifice  his 
absorbing  self-interest  to  the  national  welfare  even  in  a 
political  atmosphere  which  sickened  him  at  every  turn. 

You  may  see  what  I  mean  by  considering  that  while 
he  longed  for  nothing  so  much  in  later  life  as  the  posses- 
sion of  Broome  Park,  and  that  while  his  selfishness 
stopped  hardly  at  anything  to  enrich  that  house  with 
pictures,  china,  and  furniture,  and  that  while  he  would 
shamelessly  hint  for  things  in  the  houses  of  the  people 
who  were  entertaining  him,  even  in  the  houses  of  his 
own  subordinates,  until  the  weaker  or  the  more  timorous 
gave  him  the  object  of  his  covetousness,  nevertheless 
for  the  sake  of  his  country  he  clung  to  the  uncongenial 
chair  in  Whitehall,  not  merely  working  like  a  cart-horse 
for  what  he  considered  to  be  his  nation's  good,  but 
suffering  without  public  complaint  of  any  kind,  and 
scarcely  a  private  grumble,  all  the  numerous  humili- 
ations that  came  his  way  either  from  his  own  colleagues 
in  the  Cabinet  or  from  a  powerful  section  of  the  news- 
papers outside. 

I  remember  hearing  from  the  late  Mr.  John  Bonner, 


78    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

a  most  admirable  artist  in  many  fields,  an  amusing 
account  of  an  interview  with  Lord  Kitchener  which 
illustrates  the  Field-Marshal's  passion  for  his  Kentish 
home,  and  also  sheds  a  telling  light  on  the  aesthetic  side 
of  his  character. 

Mr.  Bonner  had  been  recommended  to  Lord 
Kitchener,  who  wanted  amorini  scattered  about  the 
leafy  gardens  at  Broome.  Drawings  were  made  and 
approved:  a  few  months  afterwards  the  amorini  were 
set  up  in  the  gardens. 

Soon  came  a  summons  to  the  presence  of  the  great 
man.  Mr.  Bonner  found  him  a  terrible  object  in  a 
terrible  rage.  In  his  late  years,  be  it  remembered, 
Lord  Kitchener  was  not  good  to  look  upon.  He 
appeared  a  coarse,  a  top-heavy  person;  and  in  anger,  his 
cross-eyes  could  be  painfully  disconcerting. 

Lord  Kitchener  forgot  that  Mr.  Bonner  was  not 
only  an  artist  of  a  singularly  beautiful  spirit,  but  a 
gentleman.  He  blazed  at  him.  What  did  he  mean 
by  sticking  up  those  ridiculous  little  figures  in  Broome? 
— what  did  he  mean  by  it? — with  an  unpleasant  refer- 
ence to  the  account. 

The  poor  artist,  terribly  affrighted,  said  that  he 
thought  Lord  Kitchener  had  seen  his  drawings  and 
approved  of  them.  "Yes,  the  drawings! — but  you 
can't  see  the  figures  when  they're  up !  What's  the  good 
of  something  you  can't  see?" 

The  great  man,  it  appeared  at  last,  wanted  amorini 
the  size  of  giants;  a  rather  Rosherville  taste. 


LORD  KITCHENER  79 

"He  had  knowledge,"  said  Lady  Sackville,  from 
whose  beautiful  house  he  borrowed  many  ideas  for 
Broome,  and  would  have  liked  to  have  carried  off  many 
of  its  possessions,  particularly  a  William  the  Fourth 
drum  which  he  found  in  his  bedroom  as  a  waste-paper 
receptacle;  "he  had  knowledge  but  no  taste." 

Her  daughter  said  to  me  on  one  occasion,  "Every 
chair  he  sits  in  becomes  a  throne,"  referring  to  the 
atmosphere  of  power  and  dignity  which  surrounded 
him. 

It  is  instructive,  I  think,  to  remark  how  a  single 
virtue  passionately  held — held,  I  mean,  with  a  religious 
sense  of  its  seriousness — can  carry  even  a  second-class 
mind  to  genuine  greatness,  a  greatness  that  can  be  felt 
if  not  defined.  In  every  sense  of  the  word  greatness, 
as  we  apply  it  to  a  saint,  a  poet,  or  a  statesman,  Lord 
Kitchener  was  a  second-class  and  even  a  third-class 
person;  but  so  driving  was  his  sense  of  duty  that  it 
carried  him  to  the  very  forefront  of  national  life,  and 
but  for  the  political  atmosphere  in  which4ie  had  to  work 
for  the  last  few  years  of  his  distinguished  service  to  the 
State  he  might  have  easily  become  one  of  the  great  and 
shining  heroes  of  British  history.  He  had  no  taste; 
but  the  impression  he  made  on  those  who  had  was  the 
impression  of  a  great  character. 

How  was  it  that  his  greatness,  that  is  to  say  his  great- 
ness of  personality,  made  so  pitiable  an  end?  What 
was  lacking  that  this  indubitable  greatness  should 
have  been  so  easily  brayed  in  the  mortar  of  politics? 


8o    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

The  answer  I  think  is  this :  a  single  virtue  can  bestow 
greatness,  and  the  greatness  may  never  fail  when  it  has 
time  and  space  in  which  to  express  itself;  but  many 
virtues  of  intellect  and  character  are  necessary  when 
time  is  of  the  essence  of  the  contract,  and  more  espe- 
cially in  a  situation  of  shared  responsibility. 

Lord  Kitchener  knew  many  of  his  own  failings.  He 
was  by  no  means  a  vain  man.  Indeed  he  suffered 
considerable  pain  from  the  knowledge  that  he  was  not 
the  tremendous  person  of  the  popular  imagination. 
This  knowledge  robbed  him  of  self- assurance.  He  tried 
to  live  up  to  the  legendary  Kitchener,  and  so  long  as  he 
could  find  men  as  brave  as  himself,  but  of  swifter  and 
more  adaptable  intelligence,  to  do  his  bidding,  he  suc- 
ceeded: many  of  the  public,  indeed,  believed  in  the 
legendary  Kitchener  up  to  the  day  of  his  tragic  death — 
death,  that  unmistakable  reality,  meeting  him  on  a 
journey,  the  object  of  which  was  to  impress  Russia  with 
the  legendary  Kitchener.  But  more  and  more,  particu- 
larly in  consultation  with  the  quick  wits  of  politicians, 
he  found  it  impossible  to  impersonate  his  reputation. 

I  have  been  told  by  more  than  one  Cabinet  Minister 
that  it  was  impressive  to  see  how  the  lightning  intellects 
of  Mr.  Lloyd  George  and  Mr.  Winston  Churchill  again 
and  again  reduced  the  gigantic  soldier  to  a  stupefied  and 
sulking  silence. 

A  proposal  would  be  made  by  a  minister,  and  Mr. 
Asquith  would  turn  to  Lord  Kitchener  for  his  opinion. 
Lord  Kitchener  would  say,  "It's  impossible,"  and  close 


LORD  KITCHENER  81 

his  lips  firmly.  At  this  Mr.  Lloyd  George  would  attack 
him,  pointing  out  the  reasonableness  of  this  proposal  in 
swift  and  persuasive  phrases.  Lord  Kitchener,  shifting 
on  his  chair,  would  repeat,  "  It's  impossible."  Then  in 
question  after  question  Mr.  Churchill  would  ask  why  it 
was  impossible.  "It's  impossible,"  Lord  Kitchener 
would  mumble  at  the  end  of  these  questions.  Finally, 
when  nearly  everybody  had  attempted  to  extract  from 
him  the  reason  for  his  refusal  to  countenance  this 
proposal,  he  would  make  an  impatient  side  movement 
of  his  head,  unfold  his  arms,  bend  over  the  papers  on  the 
table  before  him,  and  grunt  out,  sometimes  with  a  boy- 
ish smile  of  relief,  "Oh,  all  right,  have  it  your  own 
way." 

He  lacked  almost  every  grace  of  the  spirit.  There  was 
nothing  amiable  in  his  character.  Very  few  men  liked 
him  a  great  deal,  and  none  I  should  say  loved  him.  I 
do  not  think  he  was  brutal  by  nature,  although  his 
nature  was  not  refined ;  but  he  cultivated  a  brutal  man- 
ner. He  had  the  happiness  of  three  or  four  friendships 
with  cultivated  and  good  women,  but  the  beautiful 
creature  whom  he  loved  hungrily  and  doggedly,  and  to 
whom  he  proposed  several  times,  could  never  bring  her- 
self to  marry  him.  I  think  there  was  no  holy  cf  holies 
in  his  character,  no  sanctuaries  for  the  finer  intimacies 
of  human  life.  As  Sainte-Beuve  said  of  Rousseau,  "he 
has  at  times  a  little  goitre  in  his  voice."  One  sees  the 
fulness  of  his  limitations  by  comparing  him  with  such 
great  figures  of  Indian  history  as  the  Lawrences  and 


82    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

Nicholson :  in  that  comparison  he  shrinks  at  once  to  the 
dimensions  of  a  colour-sergeant. 

But  in  attempting  to  study  a  man  of  this  nature, 
for  our  own  learning,  we  should  rather  observe  how 
notable  a  victory  he  achieved  in  making  so  much  of 
so  little  than  vociferate  that  he  was  not  this  thing 
or  that. 

He  began  life  with  no  gifts  from  the  gods;  it  was  not 
in  his  horoscope  to  be  either  a  saint  or  a  hero;  no  one 
was  less  likely  to  create  enthusiasm  or  to  become  a 
legend;  and  yet  by  resolutely  following  the  road  of 
duty,  by  earnestly  and  stubbornly  striving  to  serve  his 
country's  interests,  and  by  never  for  one  moment  con- 
sidering in  that  service  the  safety  of  his  own  life  or  the 
making  of  his  own  fortune,  this  rough  and  ordinary  man 
bred  in  himself  a  greatness  which,  magnified  by  the 
legend  itself  created,  helped  his  country  in  one  of  the 
darkest  hours,  perhaps  the  very  darkest,  of  its  long 
history. 

One  could  wish  that  behind  this  formidable  greatness 
of  personality  there  had  been  greatness  of  mind,  great- 
ness of  character,  greatness  of  heart,  so  that  he  might 
have  been  capable  of  directing  the  whole  war  and  hold- 
ing the  politicians  in  leash  to  the  conclusion  of  a  right- 
eous peace.  But  these  things  he  lacked,  and  the  end 
was  what  it  was. 

"Character,"  says  Epicharmus,  "is  destiny  to  man." 
Lord  Kitchener,  let  us  assert,  was  faithful  to  his  destiny. 
And  he  was  something  more  than  faithful,  for  he 


LORD  KITCHENER  83 

sanctified  this  loyalty  to  his  own  character  by  a  devo- 
tion to  his  country  which  was  pure  and  incorruptible. 
Certainly  he  can  never  be  styled  "the  son  of  Cronos  and 
Double-dealing. ' ' 


LORD  ROBERT  CECIL 


LORD  ROBERT  CECIL 
(EDGAR  ALGERNON  CECIL) 

Born,  1864.  Educ.:  at  Eton  and  Oxford.  Private  Secretary  to  his 
father,  the  late  Marquis  of  Salisbury,  1886-88;  called  to  the  Bar,  1887; 
M.P.  for  East  Marylebone,  1906-10;  for  Hitchin  Division  of  Herts, 
1912;  Under  Secretary  for  Foreign  Affairs,  1915-16;  Assistant  Secretary 
for  Foreign  Affairs,  1918;  Manager  of  Blockade,  1916-18.  Author  of 
Principles  of  Commercial  Law  and  Our  National  Church. 


u.  &  u. 


LORD    ROBERT   CECIL 


CHAPTER  VIII 
LORD  ROBERT  CECIL 

"Nothing  great  was  ever  achieved  without  enthusiasm." — EMERSON. 

IF  a  novelist  take  for  his  hero  an  educated  gentleman 
who  expresses  contempt  for  the  licence  and  indecencies 
of  modern  life,  it  is  ten  to  one  that  the  critics,  who 
confess  themselves  on  other  occasions  as  sick  of  prurient 
tales,  will  pronounce  this  hero  to  be  a  prig.  In  like 
manner,  let  a  politician  evince  concern  for  the  moral 
character  of  the  nation  and  it  is  ten  to  one  his  colleagues 
in  the  House  of  Commons  and  his  critics  in  the  Press, 
and  everywhere  the  very  men  most  in  despair  of  politics, 
will  declare  him  to  be  a  fanatic. 

This  has  been  the  unfortunate  fate  of  Lord  Robert 
Cecil.  He  is  regarded  by  his  countrymen  as  unpracti- 
cal. Men  speak  well  of  him,  and  confess  willingly  that 
he  is  vastly  superior  in  character  and  intellect  to  the 
ruck  of  politicians,  but  nevertheless  wind  up  their  pane- 
gyrics with  the  regretful  judgment  that,  alas,  he  is  a 
fanatic. 

It  is  a  thousand  pities,  I  think,  that  he  is  not  a  fanatic. 
It  is  for  the  very  reason  he  is  not  fanatical  that  his 
progress  in  politics  has  been  in  the  suburbs  of  the 

87 


88    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

second  rank.  He  has  every  quality  for  the  first  rank, 
and  for  the  foremost  place  in  that  rank,  save  the  one 
urging  passion  of  enthusiasm.  It  is  a  sense  of  humour, 
an  engaging  sense  of  diffidence,  a  continual  deviation 
towards  a  mild  and  gentle  cynicism,  it  is  this  spirit — 
the  very  antithesis  of  a  fanatical  temper — which  keeps 
him  from  leadership. 

The  nation  has  reason  on  its  side  for  suspecting  Lord 
Robert  Cecil.  In  the  mind  of  the  British  people 
nothing  is  more  settled  than  the  conviction  that  the 
conquering  qualities  of  a  great  captain  are  courage  and 
confidence.  He  has  given  no  sign  of  these  qualities. 
Nature,  it  would  seem,  has  fashioned  him  neither 
pachydermatous  nor  pugilistic.  He  appears  upon  the 
platform  as  a  gentleman  makes  his  entrance  into  a 
drawing-room,  not  as  a  toreador  leaps  into  the  bull  ring. 
He  expresses  his  opinions  as  a  gentleman  expresses  his 
views  at  a  dinner-table,  not  as  an  ale-house  politician 
airs  his  dogmatisms  in  the  tap-room.  The  very  quali- 
ties which  give  such  a  grace  and  power  to  his  person- 
ality, being  spiritual  qualities,  prevent  him  from 
capturing  the  loud  and  grateful  loyalty  of  a  political 
party. 

Now,  while  a  man  like  Mr.  Lloyd  George  can  only 
affirm  his  own  essence  by  the  exercise  of  what  we  may 
call  brute  force,  and  by  making  use  of  vulgar  methods 
from  which  a  person  of  Lord  Robert  Cecil's  quality 
would  naturally  shrink,  it  is  nevertheless  not  at  all 
necessary  for  a  man  of  noble  character  and  greater 


LORD  ROBERT  CECIL  89 

power  to  employ  the  same  means  in  order  to  earn  the 
confidence  of  his  countrymen. 

What  is  necessary  in  this  case  is  not  brute  force  but 
fanaticism,  and  by  fanaticism  I  mean  that  spirit  which 
in  Cromwell  induced  Hume  to  call  him  "this  fanatical 
hypocrite,"  and  which  Burke  adequately  defined  in 
saying  that  when  men  are  fanatically  fond  of  an  object 
they  will  prefer  it  to  their  own  peace. 

Lord  Robert  Cecil  need  not  adopt  the  tricks  of  a 
mountebank  to  achieve  leadership  of  the  British  nation, 
but  he  must  contract  so  entire  a  faith  in  the  sacred 
character  of  his  mission  that  all  the  inhibiting  diffiden- 
cies  of  his  modest  nature  will  henceforth  seem  to  him 
like  the  whisperings  of  temptation.  He  must  cease  to 
watch  the  shifts  of  public  opinion.  He  must  cease 
merely  to  recommend  the  probable  advantage  of  rather 
more  idealism  in  the  politics  of  Europe.  He  must  act. 
He  must  learn  to  know  that  a  man  cannot  give  a  great 
idea  to  the  world  without  giving  himself  along  with  it. 
The  cause  must  consume  the  person.  Individual  peace 
must  be  sacrificed  for  world's  peace. 

From  the  very  beginning  of  the  War  Lord  Robert 
Cecil  perceived  that  the  need  of  the  nation  was  not  for 
a  great  political  leader,  but  for  a  great  moral  leader. 
He  told  me  so  with  an  unforgettable  emphasis,  well 
aware  that  under  the  public  show  of  our  national  life 
the  heart  of  the  British  people  was  famishing  for 
such  guidance.  He  numbered  himself  among  those 
anxiously  scanning  the  horizon  for  such  a  leader.  He 


90    THE  MIRRORS  OP  DOWNING  STREET 

should  have  been  instead  answering  the  inarticulate  cry 
of  the  people  for  that  leader. 

No  good  man  of  my  acquaintance  is  more  power- 
fully convinced  of  the  goodness  of  British  nature.  He 
watches  the  British  people  with  an  abiding  affection. 
He  believes  that  they  possess,  even  those  of  them  who 
appear  most  degraded  and  sordid,  the  foundational 
virtues  of  Christian  character — a  love  of  justice,  an 
instinct  for  kindness,  and  faith  in  truth.  He  knows 
that  they  are  more  capable  than  any  other  people  in 
Europe  of  generous  self-sacrifice,  and  that  any  absence 
of  grace  in  their  manner  which  must  distress  the  super- 
ficial observer  comes  rather  of  a  passion  for  honesty 
than  a  lack  of  beauty.  And  this  knowledge  of  his  goes 
with  the  conviction  that  no  man  will  ever  appeal  to  the 
British  nation  in  vain  who  bases  his  appeal  on  justice, 
fair  play,  and  charity.  What  a  nation  to  lead !  What 
an  inspiration  for  a  true  leader! 

He  is  convinced  that  no  moral  appeal  has  ever  been 
made  to  the  British  people  in  vain.  And  yet  he  has 
never  made  that  appeal.  With  grief  and  sorrow  he 
watches  the  stampeding  of  the  nation  he  so  deeply 
admires  into  murderous  and  indiscriminate  hatred  of  our 
enemies  in  the  late  war.  He  saw  the  majority  of  the 
British  people's  war-like  mood  degraded  and  vulgarized 
by  the  propaganda  of  hate.  But  he  made  no  move  to 
save  the  national  honour.  The  better  part,  and  as  I 
firmly  believe  the  greater  part,  of  the  nation  was  waiting 
for  moral  leadership :  particularly  were  the  young  men 


LORD  ROBERT  CECIL  91 

of  the  nation  who  marched  to  death  with  the  purest 
flame  of  patriotism  in  their  hearts  hungering  for  such 
leadership;  but  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  the  one  man  in 
Parliament  who  might  have  sounded  that  note,  was 
silent.  The  voice  that  should  have  made  Britain's 
glory  articulate,  the  voice  that  might  have  brought 
America  into  the  War  in  1914  and  rendered  Germany 
from  the  outset  a  house  divided  against  itself,  was  never 
heard.  Lord  Robert  Cecil  looked  on,  and  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  sprang  into  the  prize-ring  with  his  battle-cry  of 
the  knock-out  blow. 

I  wonder  if  even  the  sublimest  humility  can  excuse 
so  fatal  a  silence.  Great  powers  have  surely  great 
responsibilities. 

I  remember  speaking  to  Lord  Robert  on  one  occasion 
of  the  shooting  of  Miss  Cavell — a  brutal  act  which 
distressed  him  very  deeply.  I  said  I  thought  we 
weakened  our  case  against  Germany  by  speaking  of  that 
atrocious  act  as  a  "murder,"  since  by  the  rules  of  war, 
as  she  herself  confessed,  Miss  Cavell  incurred  the 
penalty  of  death.  He  replied:  "What  strikes  me  as 
most  serious  in  that  act  is  not  so  much  that  the  Ger- 
mans should  think  it  no  crime  to  shoot  a  woman,  but 
that  they  should  be  wholly  incapable  of  realizing  how 
such  an  atrocious  deed  would  shock  the  conscience  of 
the  world.  They  were  surprised — think  of  it ! — by  the 
world's  indignation!" 

In  this  remark  you  may  see  how  far  deeper  his 
reflections  take  him  than  what  passes  for  reflection 


92    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

among  the  propagandists  of  hate.  Abuse  of  Germany 
never  occupied  his  mind,  which  was  sorrowfully  engaged 
in  striving  to  comprehend  the  spiritual  conditions  of  the 
German  people :  he  realized,  that  is  to  say,  that  we  were 
not  fighting  an  enemy  who  could  be  shouted  down  or 
made  ashamed  by  abusive  epithets,  but  that  we  were 
opposing  a  spirit  whose  anger  and  temper  were  en- 
tirely different  from  our  own,  and  therefore  a  spirit 
which  must  be  understood  if  we  were  to  conquer  it.  It 
was  not  merely  the  armies  of  Germany  which  must  be 
defeated,  it  was  the  soul  of  Germany  which  had  to  be 
converted.  He  saw  this  clearly:  he  never  ceased  to 
work  to  that  end ;  but  he  failed  to  take  the  nation  into 
his  confidence  and  the  public  never  understood  what  he 
was  after.  A  fanatic  would  have  left  the  nation  in 
no  doubt  of  his  purpose. 

Every  now  and  then  he  has  half  let  the  nation  see 
what  was  in  his  mind.  For  example,  he  has  taken 
those  illuminating,  those  surely  inspired,  words  of 
Edith  Cavell  as  the  text  for  more  than  one  address — 
Patriotism  is  not  enough.  But  beautiful  and  convincing 
as  these  addresses  have  been,  their  spirit  has  always 
had  the  wistful  and  piano  tones  of  philosophy,  never 
the  consuming  fervour  of  fanaticism.  He  knows,  as 
few  other  men  know,  that  without  a  League  of  Nations 
the  future  of  civilization  is  in  peril,  even  the  future 
of  the  white  races;  but  he  has  never  made  the  world 
feel  genuine  alarm  for  this  danger  or  genuine  enthusi- 
asm for  the  sole  means  that  can  avert  it.  He  has  not 


LORD  ROBERT  CECIL  93 

preached  the  League  of  Nations  as  a  way  of  salvation; 
he  has  only  recommended  it  as  a  legal  tribunal. 

It  is  apparently  difficult  for  a  politician,  however 
statesmanlike  his  qualities,  to  realize  that  politics 
cannot  be  even  divorced  from  morality,  much  less  to 
comprehend  that  morality  is  the  very  sinew  of  politics, 
being  in  truth  nothing  more  than  the  conscience  of  a 
nation  striving  to  express  itself  in  State  action.  Be- 
cause of  this  politics  become  degraded  and  sink  to  the 
lowest  levels  of  a  mere  factional  manoeuvring  for  place. 
They  engage  the  attention  of  the  attorney,  and  earn 
nothing  but  the  contempt  of  the  wise.  They  become 
like  the  perversions  of  art  in  the  hands  of  those  who 
assert  that  art  has  nothing  to  do  with  morals;  they 
interest  only  a  handful  of  experts. 

But  a  man  like  Lord  Robert  Cecil  does  surely  appre- 
hend that  the  essence  of  politics  is  morality  and,  there- 
fore, his  unwillingness  to  use  moral  weapons  in  the 
political  arena  is  hard  to  understand.  He  debates 
where  he  should  appeal;  he  criticizes  where  he  should 
denounce;  and  he  accepts  a  compromise  where  he 
should  lead  a  revolt.  He  is  also  altogether  too  civil  for 
the  rogues  with  whom  he  has  to  do. 

I  remember  being  in  the  House  of  Commons  on  an 
afternoon  when  Mr.  Lloyd  George  was  expected  to 
make  an  important  speech.  Lord  Robert  Cecil  sat  in 
a  corner  seat  on  the  back  benches ;  his  brother,  Lord 
Hugh,  occupied  the  corner  seat  on  the  front  bench 
below  the  gangway.  During  the  Prime  Minister's 


94    THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

speech,  which  was  a  succession  of  small  scoring  points 
against  the  Labour  Party  delivered  with  that  spirit  of 
cocksureness  which  has  grown  with  him  in  the  last 
few  years,  I  noticed  Lord  Robert  make  a  pencilled 
note  on  a  slip  of  paper  and  pass  it  across  the  gangway 
with  a  nod  of  his  head  toward  Lord  Hugh.  I  watched 
the  journey  of  this  little  paper  and  watched  to  see 
its  effect.  Lord  Hugh  unfolded  the  slip  of  paper,  read 
it,  smiled  very  boyishly  all  over  his  face,  and,  folding 
it  up  again,  slowly  turned  his  head  and  looked  back 
towards  his  brother.  The  smile  they  exchanged  was  a 
Cecilian  biography.  One  saw  in  the  light  of  that  in- 
stant and  whole-hearted  smile  the  danger  of  a  keen 
sense  of  ironical  humour.  Both  these  men  have  the 
making  of  creative  fanatics ;  in  both  of  them  there  is  an 
intense  moral  earnestness  and  in  both  great  intellectual 
power ;  but  nature  has  mixed  up  with  these  gifts,  which 
were  intended  for  mankind,  a  drollery  of  spirit,  only 
amusing  in  the  confidence  of  private  life  which  they 
have  allowed  to  weaken  their  sincerities.  Humanity 
may  be  thankful  that  St.  Paul  was  without  a  sense  of 
humour. 

During  the  war,  as  Minister  of  Blockade,  Lord 
Robert  Cecil  rendered  services  of  the  greatest  magni- 
tude to  his  countrymen :  he  kept  Sweden  out  of  the  war 
when  the  Russian  Foreign  Office  could  hardly  breathe 
for  anxiety  on  this  point,  and  at  a  time  when  many 
British  newspapers  were  doing  their  best  to  facilitate 
the  great  desire  of  Germany  to  march  an  army  through 


LORD  ROBERT  CECIL  95 

Sweden  and  Finland  to  the  thus  easily  reached  Russian 
capital.  His  work,  too,  at  the  Peace  Conference  in 
Paris  entitles  him  to  the  gratitude  of  the  nation :  he  kept 
the  idea  of  the  League  of  Nations  alive  in  an  atmosphere 
that  was  charged  with  war.  He  prevented  these  con- 
ferences from  making  "a  Peace  to  end  Peace."  But  on 
the  whole  I  feel  that  he  is  rather  the  shadow  of  great 
statesmanship  leaning  diffidently  over  the  shoulder  of 
political  brute  force  than  the  living  spirit  of  great 
statesmanship  leading  the  moral  conscience  of  the  world 
away  from  barbarism  towards  nobler  reason  and  less 
partial  truth. 


MR.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL 


MR.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL 

The  Rt.  Hon.  Winston  Churchill  (Leonard  Spencer)  son  of  Lord 
Randolph  Churchill.  Born,  1874.  Educ.:  Harrow  and  Sandhurst. 
Entered  army  in  1895;  served  with  Spanish  Forces  in  Cuba,  1895;  in 
operations  in  India,  1897-98;  on  the  Nile  and  at  the  Battle  of  Khartoum, 
1899;  was  given  the  Khartoum  Medal  in  that  year;  Correspondent  of 
the  Morning  Post  in  South  Africa,  1899-1900;  taken  prisoner  and 
escaped,  1900;  in  long  series  of  actions  including  Spion  Kop,  Pieters, 
and  capture  of  Pretoria;  M.P.  Oldham,  1900-06;  M.P.  for  Manchester, 
1906-08;  commissioned  Colonel,  1916;  retired,  1916;  Under  Colonial 
Secretary,  1906-08;  President  Board  of  Trade,  1908-10;  Home  Secretary, 
1910-11;  First  Lord  of  the  Admiralty,  1911-15;  Minister  of  Munitions, 
1917;  Rector  of  Aberdeen  Univ.,  1914;  Chairman  of  the  Duchy  of 
Lancaster,  1915;  Author  of  a  series  of  books  (campaign  records),  and 
also  of  the  Life  of  Lord  Randolph  Churchill. 


u.  &  u. 


RT.    HON.  WINSTON    CHURCHILL 


CHAPTER  IX 
MR.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL 

"He  was  not  free  from  that  careless  life-contemning  desperation,  which 
sometimes  belongs  to  forcible  natures.  .  .  .  He  was  too  heedless  of  his  good 
name  and  too  blind  to  the  truth  that  though  right  and  wrong  may  be  near 
neighbours,  yet  the  line  that  separates  them  is  of  an  awful  sacredness." — 
JOHN  MORLEY  (of  Danton). 

MR.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL  was  one  of  its  most  interest- 
ing figures  in  the  Parliament  which  included  Joseph 
Chamberlain,  Charles  Dilke,  and  George  Wyndham. 
With  the  fading  exception  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  he  is 
easily  the  most  interesting  figure  in  the  present  House 
of  Commons. 

There  still  clings  to  his  career  that  element  of  great 
promise  and  unlimited  uncertainty  which  from  his  first 
entrance  into  politics  has  interested  both  the  public 
and  the  House  of  Commons.  He  has  disappointed 
his  admirers  on  several  occasions,  but  not  yet  has  he 
exhausted  their  patience  or  destroyed  their  hopes. 

His  intellectual  gifts  are  considerable,  his  personal 
courage  is  of  a  quality  that  makes  itself  felt  even  in  the 
bosom  of  hate,  and  he  possesses  in  a  unique  degree  the 
fighting  qualities  of  the  born  politician.  No  man  is 
more  difficult  to  shout  down,  and  no  man  responds 

99 


ioo  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

more  gratefully  to  opposition  of  the  fiercer  kind.  If  on 
several  occasions  he  has  disappointed  his  friends,  also 
on  several  occasions  he  has  confounded  his  enemies. 

From  his  youth  up  Mr.  Churchill  has  loved  with  all 
his  heart,  with  all  his  mind,  with  all  his  soul,  and  with 
all  his  strength,  three  things — war,  politics,  and  himself. 
He  loved  war  for  its  dangers,  he  loves  politics  for  the 
same  reason,  and  himself  he  has  always  loved  for  the 
knowledge  that  his  mind  is  dangerous — dangerous  to 
his  enemies,  dangerous  to  his  friends,  dangerous  to 
himself.  I  can  think  of  no  man  I  have  ever  met  who 
would  so  quickly  and  so  bitterly  eat  his  heart  out  in 
Paradise. 

He  was  once  asked  if  politics  were  more  to  him  than 
any  other  pursuit  of  mankind. 

"Politics,"  he  replied,  "are  almost  as  exciting  as 
war,  and  quite  as  dangerous." 

"Even  with  the  new  rifle?" 

"Well,  in  war,"  he  answered,  "you  can  only  be  killed 
once,  but  in  politics  many  times." 

Unhappily  for  himself,  and  perhaps  for  the  nation, 
since  he  has  many  of  the  qualities  of  real  greatness, 
Mr.  Churchill  lacks  the  unifying  spirit  of  character 
which  alone  can  master  the  discrepant  or  even  antagon- 
istic elements  in  a  single  mind,  giving  them  not  merely 
force,  which  is  something,  but  direction,  which  is  much 
more.  He  is  a  man  of  truly  brilliant  gifts,  but  you  can- 
not depend  upon  him.  His  love  for  danger  runs  away 
with  his  discretion;  his  passion  for  adventure  makes 


MR.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL  101 

him  forget  the  importance  of  the  goal.  Politics  may  be 
as  exciting  and  as  dangerous  as  war,  but  in  politics 
there  is  no  V.C. 

I  am  not  enamoured  of  the  logic  of  consistency.  It 
seems  a  rather  ludicrous  proceeding  for  an  impecunious 
young  man  to  join  a  very  strictly  political  club  with  the 
idea  in  his  mind  that  he  will  always  be  in  favour  of  that 
particular  party's  programmes.  Most  of  us,  I  think, 
will  agree  that  a  man  who  never  changes  his  opinion 
is  a  stupid  person,  and  that  one  who  boasts  in  grave 
and  hoary  age  of  his  lifelong  political  consistency  is 
merely  confessing  that  he  has  learnt  nothing  in  the 
school  of  experience.  One  sees  the  danger  of  this  state 
of  mind  when  he  thinks  of  the  theologians  who  burned 
men  of  science  at  the  stake  rather  than  be  false  to  their 
Christian  dogmas. 

Nevertheless,  illogical  and  ridiculous  as  consistency 
may  appear,  amounting  in  truth  to  nothing  more  than 
either  inability  to  see  the  other  side  of  an  argument  or  a 
deliberate  refusal  to  acknowledge  an  intellectual  mis- 
take, who  can  doubt  that  this  quality  of  the  mind 
creates  confidence?  On  the  other  hand,  who  can  doubt 
that  one  who  appears  at  this  moment  fighting  on  the  left 
hand,  and  at  the  next  moment  fighting  just  as  con- 
vincingly on  the  right,  creates  distrust  in  both  armies? 

A  newspaper  which  says  at  one  time,  "France  must 
be  rolled  in  mud  and  blood,  her  colonies  must  be  taken 
from  her  and  given  to  Germany,  she  has  no  sense  of 
honour";  and  at  another  time  describes  every  German 


102  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

as  a  Hun  and  hails  France  as  the  glory  of  civilization, 
does  not  encourage  the  judicious  reader  to  look  for 
guidance  in  its  editorial  pronouncements.  But  the 
newspaper  which  felt  itself  obliged  to  offer  France  a 
respectful  admonition  on  one  occasion  and  even  to 
oppose  French  policy  with  firmness  and  to  express  sym- 
pathy with  the  Germans  might  afterwards  acclaim  the 
great  virtues  of  France  and  oppose  itself  to  the  German 
nation  without  any  loss  of  our  respect.  In  the  one 
case  the  inconsistency  arises  from  hysterical  and  im- 
moral passion,  in  the  other  from  a  moral  principle. 

There  is  only  one  region  in  which  consistency  has 
the  great  sanction  of  an  indubitable  virtue:  it  is  the 
region  of  moral  character.  A  good  man,  a  man  who 
makes  us  feel  that  righteousness  is  the  breath  of  his 
nostrils,  may  change  his  intellectual  opinions  many 
times  without  losing  our  confidence,  deeply  as  we  may 
deplore  his  change.  Goodness  has  an  effect  on  men's 
minds  which  can  hardly  be  exaggerated.  Conduct  is 
the  one  sphere  in  which  consistency  has  an  absolute 
merit.  A  man  whose  whole  life  is  governed  by  moral 
principle  has  a  constituency  in  the  judgment  of  all 
honest  people  and  may  be  said  to  represent  mankind 
rather  than  a  party.  Even  a  cynical  opportunist  like 
Lord  Beaconsfield  had  to  confess,  "So  much  more  than 
the  world  imagines  is  done  by  personal  influence." 

Mr.  Churchill  has  not  convinced  the  world  of  this 
possession.  He  carries  great  guns,  but  his  navigation 
is  uncertain,  and  the  flag  he  flies  is  not  a  symbol  which 


MR.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL  103 

stirs  the  blood.  His  effect  on  men  is  one  of  interest 
and  curiosity,  not  of  admiration  and  loyalty.  His 
power  is  the  power  of  gifts,  not  character.  Men  watch 
him,  but  do  not  follow  him.  He  beguiles  the  reason, 
but  never  warms  the  emotions.  You  may  see  in  him 
the  wonderful  and  lightning  movements  of  the  brain, 
but  never  the  beating  of  a  steadfast  heart.  He  has 
almost  every  gift  of  statesmanship,  and  yet,  lacking  the 
central  force  of  the  mind  which  gives  strength  and 
power  to  character,  these  gifts  are  for  ever  at  the  sport 
of  circumstance.  His  inconsistencies  assume  the 
appearance  of  shifts  and  dodges. 

There  is  one  particular  way  in  which  I  think  his  in- 
consistencies have  been  dangerous  to  his  career.  They 
have  brought  him  too  often  into  inferior  company. 

Lord  Northcliffe,  with  all  his  faults,  is  a  man  to 
whom  statesmen  may  speak  their  minds  without  loss  of 
influence,  but  there  are  other  newspaper  proprietors, 
financiers  of  commercialized  journalism,  with  whom  a 
man  of  Mr.  Churchill's  power  and  position  should  hold 
no  personal  relations.  His  is  a  mind  which  stands 
in  need  of  constant  communion  with  men  of  culture 
and  refinement.  He  knows  the  world  by  this  time  well 
enough,  what  he  does  not  know  are  the  heights.  His 
character  suffers,  I  think,  from  association  with  second- 
rate  people.  He  is  too  heedless  of  his  good  name. 

Is  it  too  late  for  him  to  acquire  strength  of  character? 
His  faults  are  chiefly  the  effects  of  a  forcible  and  impetu- 
ous temperament :  they  may  be  expected  to  diminish  as 


104  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

age  increases  and  experience  moulds.  But  character 
does  not  emerge  out  of  the  ashes  of  temperament.  It 
is  not  to  be  thought  that  Mr.  Churchill  is  growing  a 
character  which  will  presently  emerge  and  create 
devotion  in  his  countrymen.  Character  for  him  must 
lie  in  those  very  qualities  which  are  now  chiefly  respon- 
sible for  his  defects — his  ardour,  his  affectibility,  his 
vehemence,  his  impetuous  rashness,  his  unquestioned 
courage.  One  thing  only  can  convert  those  qualities 
into  terms  of  character,  it  is  a  new  direction. 

There  is  perhaps  only  one  other  man  in  the  present 
House  of  Commons  who  could  do  more  than  Mr. 
Churchill  for  his  country  and  the  world.  All  Mr. 
Churchill  needs  is  the  direction  in  his  life  of  a  great  idea. 
He  is  a  Saul  on  the  way  to  Damascus.  Let  him  swing 
clean  away  from  that  road  of  destruction  and  he  might 
well  become  Paul  on  his  way  to  immortality.  This  is  to 
say,  that  to  be  saved  from  himself  Mr.  Churchill  must 
be  carried  away  by  enthusiasm  for  some  great  ideal,  an 
ideal  so  much  greater  than  his  own  place  in  politics  that 
he  is  willing  ,to  face  death  for  its  triumph,  even  the 
many  deaths  of  political  life. 

At  present  he  is  but  playing  with  politics.  Even  in 
his  most  earnest  moments  he  is  only  "in  politics"  as  a 
man  is  "in  business."  But  politics  for  Mr.  Churchill, 
if  they  are  to  make  him,  if  they  are  to  fulfil  his  promise, 
must  be  a  religion.  They  must  have  nothing  to  do 
with  Mr.  Churchill.  They  must  have  everything  to  do 
with  the  salvation  of  mankind. 


MR.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL  105 

It  is  time,  high  time,  he  hitched  his  waggon  to  a  star. 

Ever  since  I  first  met  him,  when  he  was  still  in  the 
twenties,  Mr.  Churchill  has  seemed  to  me  one  of  the 
most  pathetic  and  misunderstood  figures  in  public 
life.  People  have  got  it  into  their  heads  that  he  is  a 
noisy,  shameless,  truculent,  and  pushing  person,  a  sort 
of  intellectual  Horatio  Bottomley  of  the  upper  classes. 
Nothing  could  be  further  from  the  truth. 

Mr.  Churchill  is  one  of  the  most  sensitive  of  promi- 
nent politicians,  and  it  is  only  by  the  exercise  of  his 
remarkable  courage  that  he  has  mastered  this  element 
of  nervousness.  Ambition  has  driven  him  onward, 
and  courage  has  carried  him  through,  but  more  often 
than  the  public  thinks  he  has  suffered  sharply  in  his 
progress.  The  impediment  of  speech,  which  in  his  very 
nervous  moments  would  almost  make  one  think  his 
mouth  was  roofless,  would  have  prevented  many  men 
from  even  attempting  to  enter  public  life ;  it  has  always 
been  a  handicap  to  Mr.  Churchill,  but  he  has  never 
allowed  it  to  stop  his  way,  and  I  think  it  is  significant 
both  of  his  courage  and  the  nervousness  of  his  tempera- 
ment that  while  at  the  beginning  of  a  speech  this  thick- 
ness of  utterance  is  most  noticeable,  the  speaker's  pale 
face  showing  two  patches  of  fiery  pink  in  his  cheeks,  the 
utterance  becomes  almost  clear,  the  face  shows  no  sign 
of  self-consciousness,  directly  he  has  established  sym- 
pathy with  his  audience.  It  is  interesting  to  notice 
an  accent  of  brutality  in  his  speaking,  so  different  from 
the  suave  and  charming  tones  of  Mr.  Balfour;  this 


io6  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

accent  of  brutality,  however,  is  not  the  note  of  a  brutal 
character,  but  of  a  highly  strung  temperament  fighting 
its  own  sensibilities  for  mastery  of  its  own  mind. 
Mr.  Churchill  is  more  often  fighting  himself  than  his 
enemies. 

His  health  has  been  against  him:  his  heart  and  his 
lungs  have  not  given  him  the  support  he  needs  for  his 
adventurous  and  stormy  career.  At  times,  when  every 
man's  hand  has  seemed  to  be  against  him,  he  has  had  to 
fight  desperately  with  both  body  and  mind  to  keep 
his  place  in  the  firing  line.  Some  of  his  friends  have 
seen  him  in  a  state  of  real  weakness,  particularly  of 
physical  weakness,  and  for  myself  I  have  never  once 
found  him  in  a  truculent  or  self-satisfied  frame  of  mind. 
I  believe  he  is  at  heart  a  modest  man,  and  I  am  quite 
certain  he  is  a  delicate  and  a  suffering  man.  But  for 
the  devotion  of  his  wife  I  think  he  could  not  have  held 
his  place  so  long. 

Fate,  too,  has  opposed  him.  His  enemies  are  never 
tired  of  shouting  the  two  names  of  Antwerp  and 
Gallipoli.  They  are  convenient  terms  of  abuse:  I 
suppose  they  would  have  destroyed  most  politicians; 
certainly  they  are  more  deadly  than  such  a  phrase  as 
"spiritual  home,"  for  although  the  world  may  be 
ignorant  of  the  fact,  every  honest,  educated  man  must 
acknowledge  a  debt  of  gratitude  to  the  thinkers  of 
ancient  Germany,  while  to  be  associated  with  operations 
which  involve  the  suffering,  the  death,  and  the  defeat  of 
British  troops  is  in  every  way  more  fatal  to  reputation. 


MR.  WINSTON  CHURCHILL  107 

But,  in  truth,  both  these  strokes  of  military  strategy 
were  sound  in  conception.  I  doubt  indeed  if  the  mili- 
tary historian  of  the  future,  with  all  the  documents 
before  him,  will  not  chiefly  condemn  the  Allies  for  their 
initial  failure  to  make  Antwerp  a  sea-fed  menace  to  the 
back  of  the  German  Armies ;  while  even  in  our  own  day 
no  one  doubts  that  if  Lord  Kitchener,  in  one  of  his 
obstinate  moods,  had  not  refused  to  send  more  divisions 
to  Gallipoli  we  should  have  taken  Constantinople. 
The  fault  of  those  operations  lay  not  in  attempting 
them  but  in  not  adequately  supporting  them. 

Mr.  Churchill  has  had  bad  luck  in  these  matters, 
but  even  here  it  is  the  lack  of  character  which  has 
served  him  most  ill.  He  never  impressed  Lord  Kitch- 
ener as  a  man  of  power,  although  that  sullen  tempera- 
ment grew  in  the  end  to  feel  an  amused  affection  for 
him.  He  did  excellent  work  at  the  Admiralty,  work  of 
the  highest  kind  both  before  and  at  the  outbreak  of  war, 
but  his  colleagues  in  the  Cabinet  never  realized  the 
importance  of  this  work,  judging  it  merely  as  "one  of 
Winston's  new  crazes. ' '  Ministers  speak  of  him  in  their 
confidences  with  a  certain  amount  of  affection,  but 
never  with  real  respect.  Many  of  them,  of  course,  fear 
him,  for  he  is  a  merciless  critic,  and  has  an  element 
of  something  very  like  cruelty  in  his  nature;  but  even 
those  who  do  not  fear  him,  or  on  the  whole  rather  like 
him,  will  never  tell  you  that  he  is  a  man  to  whom  they 
turn  in  their  difficulties,  or  a  man  to  whom  the  whole 
Cabinet  looks  for  inspiration. 


io8  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

General  William  Booth  of  the  Salvation  Army  once 
told  Mr.  Churchill  that  he  stood  in  need  of  "con- 
version." That  old  man  was  a  notable  judge  of 
character. 


LORD  HALDANE 


LORD  HALDANE 

The  Rt.  Hon.  Richard  Burdon  Haldane  was  born  in  1856.  Graduate 
of  Edinburgh  University;  Professor  of  Philosophy,  St.  Andrew's  Univer- 
sity; Barrister,  1879;  Q.C.,  1890;  created  ist  Viscount,  1911;  M.P. 
from  Haddingtonshire,  1885-1911;  Sec'y  for  War,  1905-12;  Rector  of 
Edinburgh  Univ.;  Chancellor,  Univ.  of  Bristol;  Author  of  various 
philosophical  works. 


CIO 


u.  &  u. 


RT.    HON.    RICHARD    8UROON    HALDANE 


CHAPTER  X 
LORD   HALDANE 

"He  is  Attic  in  the  sense  that  he  has  no  bombast,  and  does  not  strive 
after  affect,  and  that  he  can  speak  interestingly  on  many  subjects  '  without 
raising  his  voice.'  " — GILBERT  MURRAY  (on  Xenophon). 

IF  for  nothing  else,  the  nation  owes  Lord  Haldane  a 
debt  of  gratitude  for  the  example  he  has  given  it  in 
behaviour.  No  man  so  basely  deserted  by  his  col- 
leagues and  so  scandalously  traduced  by  his  opponents 
ever  faced  the  world  with  a  greater  calm  or  a  more 
untroubled  smile. 

Lessing  said  of  grief  in  sculpture  that  it  may  writhe 
but  it  must  not  scream.  Lord  Haldane  has  not  even 
writhed.  When  a  member  of  the  House  of  Lords  asked 
him  what  he  proposed  doing  with  the  two  sacks 
crammed  full  of  abusive  letters  addressed  to  him  there 
by  correspondents  who  thus  obeyed  a  vulgar  editor's 
suggestion,  Lord  Haldane  replied  with  very  good 
humour,  ' '  I  have  an  oyster-knife  in  my  kitchen  and  an 
excellent  scullery-maid  in  my  establishment :  I  shall  see 
only  my  personal  letters." 

In  the  darkest  hour  of  his  martyrdom,  when  the 
oldest  and  staunchest  of  his  political  friends  maintained 
an  absolute  silence,  he  gave  no  sign  of  suffering  and 

in 


112  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

uttered  no  single  word  either  of  surprise  or  bitterness. 
He  seemed  to  some  of  us  in  those  days  almost  wanting 
in  sensibility,  almost  inhuman  in  his  serenity.  News- 
paper articles  which  made  most  of  us  either  wince  or 
explode  with  anger  did  nothing  more  to  the  subject 
of  their  vilification  than  to  set  him  off  laughing — a 
comfortable,  soft-sounding,  and  enjoying  laughter 
which  brought  a  light  into  his  face  and  gently  shook  his 
considerable  shoulders.  He  loved  to  produce  at  those 
moments  the  encomiums  pronounced  on  his  work  at  the 
War  Office  by  those  very  newspapers  only  a  few  years 
before  at  the  hour  of  his  triumphant  retirement. 

This  tranquillity  of  spirit  owed  nothing  to  an 
unimpressionable  mind  or  a  thick  skin.  One  came  to 
see  that  it  was  actually  that  miracle  of  psychology,  a 
philosophic  temperament  in  action.  I  believe  he  could 
have  the  toothache  without  a  grimace.  He  has  not 
only  studied  philosophy,  he  has  become  a  philosopher, 
and  not  merely  a  philosopher  in  theory  but  a  philo- 
sopher in  soul — a  practising  philosopher.  He  might 
stagger  for  a  moment  under  the  shock  of  a  tremendous 
sorrow  to  one  whom  he  loved,  but  not  all  the  shovings 
of  all  the  halfpenny  editors  of  our  commercialized 
journalism,  not  even  the  most  contemptible  deser- 
tion of  his  friends,  could  move  his  equilibrium  by  a 
hair's  breadth. 

After  the  noble  tributes  paid  to  him  by  Lord  Haig 
and  Lord  French  I  need  not  trouble  the  reader  by  deal- 
ing with  the  accusations  brought  against  the  greatest  of 


LORD  HALDANE  113 

our  War  Ministers  by  the  gutter-press  or  by  the  baser 
kind  of  politicians.  It  is  now  acknowledged  in  all 
circles  outside  of  Bedlam  that  Lord  Haldane  prepared 
a  perfect  instrument  of  war  which,  shot  like  an  arrow 
from  its  bow,  saved  the  world  from  a  German  victory, 
and  among  the  intellectual  soldiers  it  is  generally  held 
that  if  France  and  Russia  had  been  as  well  prepared  to 
fulfil  their  engagements  as  we  were  to  fulfil  ours  the  war 
would  have  ended  in  an  almost  immediate  victory  for 
the  Allies. x 

It  will  be  more  instructive  to  ask  how  a  man  who 
never  made  an  enemy  in  his  life,  and  for  whom  many  of 
our  greatest  men  have  a  deep  affection,  came  of  a 
sudden  to  be  the  target  of  such  general  and  over- 
whelming abuse.  I  think  I  can  do  something  to  clear 
up  this  mystery. 

When  he  saw  that  the  great  conflict  was  inevitable, 
Lord  Haldane  suggested  to  Mr.  Asquith,  then  acting 
as  War  Secretary,  that  he  should  go  down  to  the  War 
Office,  where  he  was  still  well  known  and  very  popular 
with  the  intellectual  generals,  and  mobilize  his  own 
machine  for  war.  The  harassed  and  overburdened  Mr. 
Asquith  gratefully  accepted  this  suggestion. 

1  It  is  well  known  that  Lord  Haig  regards  Lord  Haldane  as  the  great- 
est Secretary  of  State  for  War  that  England  ever  had;  he  has  expressed 
his  gratitude  again  and  again  for  the  manner  in  which  Lord  Haldane 
organized  the  military  forces  of  Great  Britain  for  a  war  on  the  Contin- 
ent. Lord  French  has  said:  "He  got  nothing  but  calumny  and  abuse; 
but  the  reward  to  such  a  man  does  not  come  in  the  ordinary  way.  I 
had  proved  the  value  of  his  great  work  and  that  is  all  the  reward  he  ever 
wanted." 

8 


114  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

Accordingly  Lord  Haldane  went  down  to  the  War 
Office,  and  knowing  that  speed  was  the  one  thing  to 
save  us  from  a  German  avalanche,  began  to  mobilize 
the  Expeditionary  Force.  Some  of  the  generals  were 
alarmed.  War  was  not  yet  declared.  The  cost  of 
mobilization  ran  into  millions.  Suppose  war  did 
not  come  after  all,  how  were  those  millions  to  be  met? 
Lord  Haldane  brushed  aside  every  consideration  of  this 
kind.  Mobilization  was  to  be  pushed  on,  cost  what  it 
might.  He  had  not  studied  his  Moltke  to  no  profit. 

On  leaving  the  War  Office  that  same  day,  after  having 
mobilized  the  British  Army,  he  went  across  to  the 
Foreign  Office  and  was  there  stopped  by  a  certain 
soldier  who  asked  him  how  many  divisions  he  was  send- 
ing to  France.  Lord  Haldane  very  naturally  rebuked 
this  person  for  asking  such  a  question,  telling  him  that 
war  was  not  yet  declared  and  that  therefore  perhaps  no 
divisions  at  all  would  go  to  France. 

Never  was  a  just  reproof  more  fatal  to  him  who 
administered  it. 

I  believe  this  soldier  went  straight  off  to  an  impor- 
tant Civil  Servant  with  the  sensational  news  that  Lord 
Haldane  was  holding  back  the  Expeditionary  Force, 
and  afterwards  carried  the  same  false  news  to  one  of 
the  most  violent  anti-German  publicists  in  London,  a 
frenzied  person  who  enjoys  nevertheless  a  certain 
power  in  Unionist  circles.  In  a  few  hours  it  was  all 
over  London  that  the  Liberals  were  going  to  desert 
France,  that  Lord  Haldane,  a  friend  of  the  German 


LORD  HALDANE  115 

Kaiser,  had  got  back  to  the  War  Office,  and  that  he  was 
preventing  mobilization. 

I  am  quite  willing  to  believe  that  the  snubbed  soldier 
honestly  thought  he  was  spreading  a  true  story:  I  am 
sure  that  the  frenzied  publicist  believed  this  story  with 
all  the  lunatic  fervour  of  his  utterly  untrained  and 
utterly  intemperate  mind;  but  what  I  cannot  bring 
myself  to  believe  for  a  moment  is  that  the  Unionist 
statesman  to  whom  this  story  was  taken,  and  who  there 
and  then  gave  orders  for  a  campaign  against  Lord 
Haldane,  was  inspired  by  any  motive  less  immoral,  less 
cynical,  and  less  disgraceful  to  a  man  of  honour  than  a 
desire  for  office. 

He  saw  the  opportunity  of  discrediting  the  Liberal 
Government  through  Lord  Haldane  and  took  it.  The 
Cabinet  was  to  fall  under  suspicion  because  one  of  its 
members  could  be  accused  of  pro-Germanism.  Lord 
Haldane,  against  whom  his  friend  Lord  Morley  now 
brings  the  sorrowful  charge  that  he  was  responsible  for 
the  war;  Lord  Haldane,  against  whom  all  the  German 
writers  have  brought  charges  of  stealing  their  War 
Office  secrets  and  of  defeating  their  diplomacy,  was  to 
be  called  a  pro-German — a  man  actually  doing  Ger- 
many's work  in  the  British  War  Office.  And  this  for  a 
Party  purpose. 

Mr.  Arthur  Balfour,  by  nature  the  most  selfish  of 
men  and  also  an  intemperate  lover  of  office,  would  never 
have  stooped  to  such  dishonour ;  but  among  the  leaders 
of  the  Unionist  Party  there  was  to  be  found  a  man  who 


ii6  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

saw  in  a  lie  the  opportunity  for  a  Party  advantage 
and  took  it. 

In  these  matters  a  statesman  need  not  show  himself. 
A  word  to  one  or  two  newspaper  proprietors  is  sufficient. 
Nor  need  he  hunt  up  any  arguments.  The  newspaper 
reporter  will  not  leave  a  dust-bin  unsearched.  One 
word,  nay,  the  merest  hint  is  sufficient.  So  stupid,  so 
supine,  is  the  public,  that  Fleet  Street  will  undertake 
to  destroy  a  man's  reputation  in  a  week  or  two. 

It  was  in  this  fashion  that  Lord  Haldane  fell. 

"You  have  killed  me,"  says  Socrates,  "because  you 
thought  to  escape  from  giving  an  account  of  your  lives. 
But  you  will  be  disappointed.  There  are  others  to  convict 
you,  accusers  whom  I  held  back  when  you  knew  it  not,  they 
will  be  harsher  inasmuch  as  they  are  younger,  and  you  will 
wince  the  more." 

One  day  the  full  truth  of  this  scandalous  story  will  be 
told,  and  the  historian  will  then  pronounce  a  judgment 
which  will  leave  an  indelible  stain  on  the  reputation  of 
some  who  with  a  guilty  conscience  now  sun  themselves 
in  the  prosperity  of  public  approval.  Their  children 
will  not  read  that  judgment  without  bitter  shame. 

I  condemn  in  this  matter  not  only  the  man  who  gave 
the  order  for  calumny  and  slander  to  set  to  work  but, 
first,  the  friends  of  Lord  Haldane  who  kept  silence, 
and,  second,  the  democracy  of  these  islands  which 
allowed  itself  to  be  deceived  and  exploited  by  the  lowest 
kind  of  newspapers. 

Why  was  Sir  Edward  Grey  silent?    He  was  living  in 


LORD  HALDANE  117 

Lord  Haldane's  house  at  the  time,  and,  agonizing  over 
the  abhorrent  prospect  of  European  slaughter  and 
striving  to  the  point  of  a  nervous  collapse  to  avert  this 
calamity,  was  devotedly  served  and  strengthened  by  his 
host.  Why  was  he  silent? 

Why  was  Mr.  Asquith  silent?  He  knew  that  Lord 
Haldane  had  delivered  the  War  Office  from  chaos  and 
had  given  to  this  country  for  the  first  time  in  its  history 
a  coherent  and  brilliantly  efficient  weapon  for  this  very 
purpose  of  a  war  with  Germany.  He  spoke  when  it 
was  too  late.  Why  did  he  not  speak  when  the  hounds 
were  in  full  cry? 

And  why  were  Mr.  Lloyd  George  and  Mr.  Winston 
Churchill  silent?  Could  they  not  have  told  the  nation 
that  they  had  grudged  Lord  Haldane  his  Army  esti- 
mates, and  that  they  had  even  suggested  another  and 
less  expensive  scheme  of  national  defence — a  scheme 
that  was  actually  examined  by  the  War  Office  experts 
and  condemned? 

Let  Mr.  Lloyd  George  look  back.  If  he  had  had 
his  way  with  the  War  Office  could  Germany  have  been 
stopped  from  reaching  Paris  and  seizing  the  Channel 
ports?  Moreover,  if  he  had  had  his  way,  could  he 
himself  have  hoped  to  escape  hanging  on  a  lamp-post? 
Is  it  not  true  to  say  that  in  saving  France  from 
an  overwhelming  and  almost  immediate  destruction 
the  British  Expeditionary  Force  also  saved  his  neck,  the 
neck  of  Mr.  Winston  Churchill,  and  the  necks  of  all  the 
Cabinet?  But  if  this  is  so,  and  his  own  conscience  shall 


ii8  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

be  the  judge,  how  is  it  that  he  said  no  word  to  the  nation 
which  might  have  saved  Lord  Haldane  from  martyr- 
dom? 

The  nation,  I  think,  does  not  know  what  it  loses  in 
allowing  its  judgment  to  be  stampeded  by  unconscion- 
able journalism.  Lord  Haldane  is  no  political 
dilettante.  Few  men  in  modern  times  have  brought 
to  politics  a  mind  so  trained  in  right  thinking,  or  a  spirit 
so  full  of  that  impressive  quality,  as  Morley  calls  it» 
the  presentiment  of  the  eve:  "  a  feeling  of  the  difficulties 
and  interests  that  will  engage  and  distract  mankind 
on  the  morrow."  Long  ago  he  foresaw  the  need  in  our 
industrial  life  of  the  scientific  spirit,  and  in  our  demo- 
cracy of  a  deeper  and  more  profitable  education.  "  Look 
at  Scotland,  the  best  educated  nation;  and  at  Ireland, 
the  worst!"  For  these  things  he  prepared.  Long 
ago,  too,  he  thought  out  a  better  and  a  complete 
system  of  Cabinet  government.  Long  ago  he  had 
seen  that  the  enmity  between  Capital  and  Labour 
must  be  brought  to  an  end  and  an  entirely  new 
relation  brought  into  existence,  identifying  the  pro- 
sperity of  the  one  with  the  other.  For  this,  too,  he  had 
a  scheme.  These  things  were  the  chief  concern  of  his 
life,  and  only  for  these  things  did  he  remain  in  politics. 

The  nation  would  have  been  in  a  healthier  condition 
if  Lord  Haldane's  reasoned  policy  had  been  acted  upon 
and  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  talent  for  oratory  had  been 
employed  to  explain  that  reasoned  policy  to  the  less 
educated  sections  of  the  public,  instead  of  used  to  arouse 


LORD  HALDANE  119 

an  angry  opposition  to  the  unreasoned  and  disconnected 
reforms  of  his  own  conception. 

But  what  a  topsy-turvy  world !  Mr.  Lloyd  George  is 
"the  man  who  won  the  war,"  he  who  did  nothing  to 
prepare  for  it,  and  suggested  some  things  that  might 
have  made  it  difficult  to  be  won;  while  Lord  Haldane, 
who  did  prepare  for  it,  and  whose  work  did  save  the 
whole  world,  is  cast  out  of  office.  And  when  the  war  is 
won,  and  Lord  Haldane's  position  has  been  publicly  and 
nobly  vindicated  by  Lord  Haig,  Mr.  Lloyd  George  as 
Prime  Minister  of  England  has  a  portfolio  for  Mr. 
Austen  Chamberlain  and  another  for  Dr.  Macnamara, 
but  none  for  this  man  to  whom  more  than  to  any  other 
politician  he  owes  his  place  and  perhaps  his  life. 

Lord  Haldane  is  not  what  Prodicus  used  to  call  "a 
Boundary  Stone,  half  philosopher  and  half  practical 
statesman."  His  philosophy  is  his  statesmanship,  and 
his  statesmanship  is  his  philosophy.  He  has  brought 
to  the  study  of  human  life  a  profound  mind  and  a 
trained  vision.  His  search  after  truth  has  destroyed 
in  him  all  pettiness  of  personal  ambition.  He  de- 
sires, because  he  regards  it  as  the  highest  kind  of 
life,  to  further  the  work  of  creative  evolution,  to  be 
always  on  the  side  of  spiritual  forces,  and  never  to  be 
deceived  by  transitory  materialism.  Democracy  has 
need  of  these  qualities,  and  a  great  empire  without  such 
qualities  in  its  statesmen  can  hardly  endure  the  test  of 
time.  • 

His  faults  are  a  too  generous  confidence  in  the  good 


120  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

sense  of  democracy  and  a  lack  of  impassioned  energy. 
He  is  too  much  a  thinker,  too  little  a  warrior. 
Unhappily  he  is  not  an  effective  speaker,  and  his  writing 
is  not  always  as  clear  as  his  ideas.  He  is  at  his  best  in 
conversation  with  men  whom  he  likes. 

His  activity  is  enormous,  but  it  is  the  activity  of  the 
scholar.  He  works  far  into  the  night,  takes  little  or  no 
exercise,  and  avoids  "that  dance  of  mimes" — the  life  of 
society.  By  hard  reading  he  keeps  himself  abreast  of 
knowledge  in  almost  every  one  of  its  multitudinous 
departments  and  will  go  a  long  journey  to  hear  a 
scientific  lecture  or  to  take  part  in  a  philosophical 
discussion.  He  is  the  friend  of  philosophers,  theo- 
logians, men  of  science,  men  of  letters,  and  many 
a  humble  working  man.  He  was  never  privately 
deserted  in  the  long  months  of  his  martyrdom.  His 
charming  London  house,  so  refined  and  so  dignified  in  its 
simplicity,  was  the  frequent  meeting-place  of  many 
even  in  those  bad  days  when  the  door  outside  was 
daubed  with  paint,  the  windows  broken,  and  a  police- 
man stood  on  guard.  A  few  of  us  wished  he  took  his 
ill-treatment  with  a  fiercer  spirit;  but  looking  back 
now  I  think  that  even  the  youngest  of  us  perceives 
that  he  was  unconsciously  teaching  us  by  his  behaviour 
one  of  the  noblest  lessons  to  be  learned  in  the  school  of 
life. 

Let  his  fate  teach  democracy  that  when  it  has  found 
a  leader  whom  it  can  trust,  it  must  be  prepared  to  fight 
for  him  as  well  as  to  follow  him.  No  statesman  is  safe 


LORD  HALDANE  121 

from  the  calumny  of  newspapers,  and  no  statesman 

violently  and  persistently  attacked  in  a  crisis   can 

depend  upon  the  loyalty  of  his  colleagues.  It  is  not 
in  our  politics  as  it  is  in  our  games. 


LORD  RHONDDA 


LORD  RHONDDA  OF  LLANWERN 
(DAVID  ALFRED  THOMAS  MACKWORTH) 

First  Baron,  1916.  Born,  in  Aberdare,  Wales,  1856;  died,  1919. 
Educated  with  tutors,  and  later  at  Caius  College,  Cambridge;  Scholar 
also,  of  Jesus;  President  South  Wales  Liberal  Federation,  1893-97; 
M.P.  for  Merthyr,  1888-1910;  for  Cardiff,  1910;  Food  Controller,  1917- 
1919. 


LORD    RHONDDA 


u.  &  u. 


CHAPTER  XI 
LORD  RHONDDA 

"  Whereof  what  better  witness  can  ye  expect  I  should  produce  than  one  of 
your  own  now  sitting  in  Parliament." — MILTON. 

IN  the  Merry  Passages  and  Jests  of  old  Sir  Nicholas 
Lestrange  record  is  made  of  the  following  witty 
definition:  "Edm.  Gurney  used  to  say  that  a  mathe- 
matitian  is  like  one  that  goes  to  markett  to  buy  an 
axe  to  break  an  egg." 

This  perhaps  had  been  the  fate  of  Lord  Rhondda, 
for  he  was  by  nature  of  a  true  mathematical  turn,  had 
not  the  circumstances  of  his  economic  life  forced  him  to 
apply  this  natural  tendency  to  the  practical  affairs  of 
commerce.  But  nature  herself  had  given  him  with  this 
aptitude  for  mathematics  another  quality  which  must 
eventually,  one  would  suppose,  have  saved  him  from 
the  unfruitful  fate  of  a  theorist — he  was  a  man  of  rare 
imagination.  And  so  this  mathematician,  who  was 
also  a  poet,  brought  a  unique  mind  to  the  affairs  of  com- 
merce and  there  scored  a  success  which  attracted  atten- 
tion in  both  hemispheres. 

I  do  not  know  a  better  example  to  illustrate  the  main 
thesis  of  this  book  than  the  case  of  Lord  Rhondda.  No 

125 


126  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

doubt  the  case  of  a  greater  man,  Lord  Leverhulme, 
would  lend  itself  to  a  far  stronger  illustration  of  that 
thesis,  but,  unfortunately  for  my  argument  and  for  the 
nation,  Lord  Leverhulme  has  never  had  an  opportunity 
of  vindicating  in  office  those  qualities  which  the  House 
of  Commons  neglected  or  overlooked  during  the  years 
in  which,  like  Lord  Rhondda,  he  sat  humbly  on  its  back 
benches. 

For  the  best  part  of  his  manhood  Lord  Rhondda 
was  a  political  failure.  The  House  of  Commons,  which 
prides  itself  on  its  judgment  of  men,  treated  him  as  a 
person  of  no  importance.  He  represented  one  of  the 
largest  industrial  constituencies  in  the  country,  was 
always  returned  by  an  overwhelming  majority,  and 
was  known  to  be  in  his  own  district  an  administrator  of 
far-reaching  talent;  but  because  he  could  not  speak 
effectually,  and  because  the  House  of  Commons — that 
most  self-satisfied  assembly  of  mediocrities — did  not 
take  to  him,  he  was  never  offered  by  his  political  leaders 
during  all  the  long  years  of  his  patient  service  even  an 
under-secretaryship. 

This  was  the  man  who  saved  the  nation  from  one  of 
its  greatest  perils  during  perhaps  the  most  critical 
period  of  the  war. 

As  one  examines  Lord  Rhondda's  administration  of 
the  Ministry  of  Food  one  discovers  an  interesting  and 
surely  an  important  fact  in  the  psychology  of  our  public 
life. 

His  triumph,  which  was  one  of  the  greatest  in  the  war, 


LORD  RHONDDA  127 

lay  almost  entirely  in  the  region  of  personality.  For  his 
gravest  difficulties  were  not  so  much  in  the  office  of  the 
Ministry  as  in  the  great  and  grumbling  world  outside, 
where  toiling  men  and  women  stood  outside  provision 
shops  for  hours  in  the  rain  and  cold  only  to  be  told  in  the 
vast  majority  of  cases  when  their  turn  came  that 
supplies  were  exhausted  for  that  day. 

By  the  power  of  his  imagination  Lord  Rhondda  saw 
that  the  first  step  towards  saving  a  very  perilous 
situation  was  to  convince  this  vast  world  of  seething 
discontent  that  absolute  justice  should  characterize 
the  administration  of  his  office.  To  this  end,  satisfied 
that  those  about  him  were  men  of  devoted  zeal  and  real 
talent,  he  set  himself  to  the  creation  of  a  public  opinion 
favourable  to  the  discharge  of  his  duties.  And  by  a 
stroke  of  inspiration  he  saw  that  to  achieve  this  tran- 
quillity of  the  public  mind  he  must  give  his  own  person- 
ality to  the  world.  His  character  must  become  a 
public  possession.  A  man,  and  not  an  office,  must 
stand  for  Food  Control.  The  instinct  of  the  Briton  for 
justice  and  fair  play  must  receive  assurance  from  a  moral 
personality. 

Therefore  no  member  of  the  Government  was  more 
accessible,  or  more  ready  to  be  interviewed  and  photo- 
graphed, than  the  Food  Controller.  It  was  not  vanity, 
but  foreseeing  statesmanship,  which  opened  his  door 
to  the  humblest  newspaper  reporter  who  visited  the 
Ministry.  His  personality — a  moral,  just,  fearless, 
and  confident  personality — had  to  be  conveyed  to  the 


i2S  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

mind  of  the  public,  and  every  interview  he  gave  to  the 
Press  had  this  important  objective  for  its  reason.  He 
saw  the  morals  of  an  economic  situation,  and  he  solved 
those  economics  very  largely  by  making  a  moral 
impression  on  the  public  mind. 

The  work  of  his  office  was  carried  to  victory  by  Sir 
William  Beveridge,  Captain  Tallents,  Professor  Conner, 
and  other  very  able  men  in  charge  of  rationing ;  but  this 
work  must  have  failed  had  it  not  been  for  public  con- 
fidence in  Lord  Rhondda's  integrity;  and,  moreover, 
Lord  Rhondda's  character  played  no  small  part  in 
firing  that  work  with  a  zeal  and  passion  which  were 
excelled  by  no  other  department  of  public  service. 
Men  not  only  worked  hard  for  him,  they  worked  for 
him  affectionately. 

His  choice  of  Mr.  J.  H.  Clynes  was  inspired  by  the 
same  idea.  He  had  heard  this  labour  member  speak, 
and  had  been  impressed  by  the  moral  qualities  of  his 
oratory ;  he  knew  that  in  choosing  him  to  represent  the 
Food  Ministry  in  the  House  of  Commons  he  might  be 
sure  of  the  confidence  of  Labour,  both  there  and  in  the 
drcles  of  trade  unionism.  He  was  not  deceived.  Mr. 
Clynes  was  the  most  loyal  and  impressive  of  lieutenants, 
who,  on  one  occasion  in  particular,  saved  a  difficult 
situation. 

Lord  Rhondda  realized  the  moral  qualities  of  states- 
manship. He  appealed  to  the  highest  instincts  of  his 
countrymen.  This  was  his  greatest  achievement. 

He  was  in  many  ways  a  lovable  man.     The  quality 


LORD  RHONDDA  129 

which  chiefly  drew  people  to  him  was  his  extreme 
boyishness.  The  remarkable  beauty  of  his  face  always 
seemed  to  me  an  expression  of  this  delightful  boyish- 
ness— his  smile  deepening  this  effect  in  a  most  charming 
manner.  He  loved  life  with  a  boy's  fervour,  regarding 
it  always  as  an  opportunity  for  winning  success.  The 
difficulties  of  work,  like  the  difficulties  of  a  mathemati- 
cal problem  called  out  the  athletic  qualities  of  an  other- 
wise shy  and  almost  effeminate  nature.  He  loved  to  pit 
his  brains  against  other  men,  rejoiced  to  discover 
obstacles  in  his  path,  never  despaired  when  things  went 
against  him,  and  infinitely  preferred  the  battle  for 
success  to  the  success  itself.  In  this,  too,  he  was  a  boy ; 
he  had  to  win  a  fight  fairly  and  honourably  to  enjoy 
the  victory.  I  believe  him  to  have  been  one  of  the 
most  honest  and  straightforward  men  that  ever  made 
a  fortune  in  business. 

There  was  no  man  less  embittered  by  failure  and 
disappointment.  He  seems  to  have  had  reason  to 
believe  that  Mr.  Lloyd  George  frustrated  his  early 
efforts  as  a  politican,  indeed  he  told  me  more  than  once 
that  Mr.  Lloyd  George  had  deliberately  set  himself 
to  that  end;  and  yet  it  was  at  Mr.  Lloyd  George's 
earnest  beseeching  that  he  accepted  the  office  of  Food 
Controller,  and  once  a  member  of  his  Cabinet,  he  seldom 
spoke  of  this  old  opponent  without  the  warmest 
admiration.  "You  can't  trust  him  a  yard,"  he  said  to 
me  on  one  occasion  laughing  very  good-naturedly;  "but 
there  is  not  a  man  in  the  Government  who  can  hold  a 


130  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

candle  to  him  for  courage  and  inspiration.  I  know  very 
well  that  I  could  never  have  done  what  he  has  done. 
More  than  any  man  in  the  country  he  has  pulled  us 
through  the  critical  days  of  the  war.  He  is  wonderful — 
nothing  short  of  wonderful — and  sometimes  I  feel 
almost  fond  of  him,  for  he  has  many  likeable  sides  to  his 
character;  all  the  same,  I  know  very  well  he  is  not  to  be 
trusted.  I  took  office  on  certain  conditions,  not  one  of 
which  has  he  observed.  He  is  one  of  those  men  with 
whom  you  cannot  deal  confidently." 

This  was  the  bitterest  thing  I  ever  heard  him  say 
of  his  former  enemy.  As  regards  the  old  days  in  the 
House  of  Commons,  he  told  me  that  there  was  room 
for  only  one  leader  in  Wales,  and  that,  while  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  could  speak,  he  couldn't,  and  so  Mr.  Lloyd 
George,  who  was  consumed  by  personal  ambition,  had 
won  the  battle.  In  saying  this  he  smiled  like  a  boy, 
and  only  grew  serious  when  he  added  of  those  wasted 
years,  "The  bother  is  I  had  a  lot  of  useful  things  I 
wanted  to  do  for  the  country." 

He  was  convinced  that  he  could  have  paid  off  the 
whole  of  the  National  Debt  during  those  years. 

A  good  judge  of  statesmen  said  of  Lord  Rhondda  that 
he  would  have  made  the  greatest  Chancellor  of  the 
Exchequer  these  islands  had  ever  possessed.  I  do 
not  think  there  can  be  any  doubt  of  this,  for  his  genius 
lay  in  figures  and  he  had  extraordinary  swiftness  in 
seeing  his  way  through  expensive  chaos  to  economical 
order.  His  mind  was  constructive,  if  not  positively 


LORD  RHONDDA  131 

creative.  He  was  never  happier — except  when  birds '- 
nesting  or  romping  with  young  people — than  when  he 
was  in  an  arm-chair  working  out  with  pencil  and  paper 
some  problem  of  administration  which  involved  enor- 
mous figures.  He  would  sit  up  to  the  small  hours  of 
the  morning  over  his  work,  and  would  come  down  to 
breakfast  radiant  with  happiness,  bursting  with  energy, 
exclaiming,  "I  had  a  glorious  time  last  night!"  Cer- 
tainly he  would  have  brought  to  the  Treasury  an  original 
mind,  and  a  mind,  moreover,  profoundly  acquainted 
with  the  activities  of  trade  and  commerce — those 
important  factors  in  national  finance  which  appear  to 
cut  so  small  a  figure  in  the  minds  of  bankers  and 
officials. 

Although  a  rather  dull  speaker,  few  men  of  my 
acquaintance  were  more  lucid  and  convincing  in 
conversation,  particularly  when  he  addressed  a  sym- 
pathetic mind.  This  was  notably  the  case  when  he  was 
unfolding  his  ideas  on  the  conflicting  theories  of  In- 
dividualism and  Socialism.  If  his  conversations  on  this 
head  could  be  printed  in  a  book  they  would  make 
difficult  work  even  for  the  most  ingenious  apologists 
of  Socialism.  He  was  persuaded  that  no  theory  of 
Socialism  could  be  put  into  successful  practice  without 
involving  the  loss  of  personal  freedom,  and  that  without 
Individualism  there  would  be  no  initiative,  no  audacity, 
and  no  creative  energy  in  the  development  of  an 
industry.  Whenever  he  was  in  conflict  with  Socialists 
he  would  say  to  them,  "Why  don't  you  buy  me  out 


132  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

and  run  the  mines  yourselves?  You  have  plenty 
of  money  in  your  unions,  and  I  am  quite  willing  to 
sell." 

There  were  several  strange  and  interesting  move- 
ments in  his  otherwise  quite  simple  and  boyish  nature. 
For  example,  he  had  no  religious  faith  worth  speaking 
about,  certainly  no  dogmatic  faith  of  any  kind ;  but  he 
always  said  his  prayers.  Then  he  held  the  theory  that 
old  age  was  a  form  of  disease,  and  so  avoided,  as  much  as 
possible,  the  society  of  old  people,  fearing  contagion ;  the 
young  people  with  whom  he  loved  to  surround  himself, 
and  on  whom  he  delighted  to  play  many  practical 
jokes,  he  called  his  "young  germs." 

He  was  entirely  free  from  all  forms  of  snobbishness, 
and  would  make  fun  of  titles  and  honours  and  ridicule 
aristocratic  pretensions;  yet  he  went  somewhat  pain- 
fully out  of  his  way  to  get  a  title  from  his  Party  when 
he  retired  from  the  House  of  Commons,  and  was 
justly  indignant  at  the  way  this  bargain  was  broken 
by  the  Liberal  leaders  of  that  day.  I  think  he 
wanted  a  title  at  that  time  chiefly  to  prove  to  his 
constituents  that  he  had  faithfully  done  his  duty  by 
them. 

He  seldom  read  a  book  of  any  account  after  he  came 
down  from  Cambridge,  but  hardly  a  day  of  his  life 
passed  that  he  did  not  learn  by  heart  a  number  of  fine 
sayings  which  appealed  to  him  in  a  book  of  quotations. 
These  quotations  he  would  fire  off  at  his  family  till  they 
cried  for  mercy,  or  another  set. 


LORD  RHONDDA  133 

He  was  far  happier  among  his  Herefords  at  Llanwern 
than  in  London  or  in  Cardiff,  but  he  was  for  ever  post- 
poning the  day  of  his  retirement  from  public  life.  He 
kept  all  his  boy's  love  for  birds  and  animals,  and  had 
real  feeling  for  beautiful  things  in  nature ;  but  the  game 
of  life  drew  him  always  towards  the  city. 

At  one  time  he  smoked  a  prodigious  number  of 
cigars  and  drank  a  bottle  of  port  every  night,  but  about 
twenty  years  before  his  death  he  gave  up  both  habits 
on  the  challenge  of  a  friend  and  never  reverted  to  them 
again.  Mr.  William  Brace,  the  miners'  leader,  said  to 
me  one  day,  "  Rhondda  has  the  income  of  a  duke  and  the 
tastes  of  a  peasant,  whereas  I  have  the  income  of  a 
peasant  and  the  tastes  of  a  duke."  I  told  Lord 
Rhondda  this,  and  he  smiled  quietly  over  the  remark, 
saying,  "He's  a  very  pleasant  fellow,  Brace:  fond  of 
pictures,  and  a  good  judge  of  them,  too.  Yes,  I  suppose 
my  tastes  are  rather  simple  when  you  come  to  look  at 
them,  but  I  don't  find  them  cheap."  He  was  on  excel- 
lent terms  with  Labour  politicians,  knew  many  of 
the  old  miners  with  real  intimacy,  and  could  handle 
large  bodies  of  men  with  consummate  tact. 

I  do  not  think  for  a  moment  that  he  was  a  very  great 
man,  but  I  can  think  of  few  Cabinet  ministers  during 
the  last  thirty  years  who  were  anything  like  so  well- 
fitted  to  render  the  nation  real  and  lasting  service. 
Lord  Rhondda  had  genius,  and  though  a  boyish  egoist 
in  his  private  life  he  was  earnestly  and  most  eagerly 
anxious  to  sacrifice  all  he  possessed  for  the  good  of  the 


134  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

State.  That  he  came  so  late  and  for  so  brief  a  period 
to  power  I  regard,  if  not  as  a  national  misfortune,  at 
any  rate  as  a  striking  condemnation  of  our  methods  of 
government. 


LORD  INVERFORTH 


LORD  INVERFORTH 

1ST  BARON  OF  SOUTHGATE 

(ANDREW  WEIR) 

Born,  1865.  Head  of  firm  of  Andrew  Weir  and  Co.  shipowners  of 
Glasgow,  Surveyor  General  of  Supplies,  1917-19;  Minister  of  Munitions, 
1919. 


By  permission  of  Russell  &  Sons 


LORD    INVERFORTH 


CHAPTER  XII 
LORD   INVERFORTH 

"Gratitude  is  a  fruit  of  great  cultivation;  you  do  not  find  it  among  gross 
people." — DR.  JOHNSON. 

WE  are  keeping  up  Voltaire's  idea  of  our  English 
character.  Instead  of  only  admirals,  however,  we  are 
now  hanging  all  sorts  and  descriptions  of  our  public 
servants,  but  whether  to  encourage  the  others  or  to 
pay  off  a  grudge,  who  shall  determine? 

Lord  Inverforth  takes  his  hanging  very  well.  One 
might  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  he  is  not  merely  unaware 
of  the  noose  round  his  neck  but  so  perverse  as  to  think 
he  is  still  alive.  His  sense  of  humour  is  as  good  to  him 
as  a  philosophic  temperament. 

I  like  his  sense  of  humour.  It  manifests  itself  very 
quietly  and  with  a  flash  of  unexpectedness.  One  day  at 
luncheon  he  was  speaking  of  Lord  Leverhulme,  whose 
acquaintance  he  had  made  only  a  week  or  two  before. 
Someone  at  the  table  said,  "What  I  like  about  Lever- 
hulme is  his  simplicity.  In  spite  of  all  his  tremendous 
undertakings  he  preserves  the  heart  of  a  boy."  With  a 
twinkle  in  his  eyes,  and  in  a  soft  inquiring  voice,  "Have 
you  ever  tried  to  buy  glycerine  from  him?"  asked  Lord 
Inverforth. 

137 


138  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

This  story  has  a  sequel.  I  mentioned  it  to  Lord 
Leverhulme.  "One  day  two  Englishmen,"  he  replied 
at  once,  "were  passing  the  Ministry  of  Munitions. 
They  saw  Lord  Inverforth  going  in.  One  who  did  not 
recognize  him  said,  'Anyone  can  tell  that  man;  he's  a 
Scotsman.'  To  which  the  other,  who  did  recognize 
him,  replied,  'Yes,  but  you  couldn't  tell  that  Scotsman 
anything  else.'  You  might  repeat  that  story  to  Lord 
Inverforth  the  next  time  you  meet  him." 

I  did,  and  the  Minister  of  Munitions  accepted  the 
compliment  with  a  good  grace. 

It  is  a  fortunate  thing  for  this  country  that  a  man  of 
so  remarkable  a  genius  for  organization  as  Lord  Inver- 
forth should  be  found  willing  to  serve  the  national 
interests  in  spite  of  an  almost  daily  campaign  of  abuse 
directed  against  his  administration.  I  sometimes  wish 
he  would  bring  an  action  for  libel  against  one  of  these 
critics.  It  would  be  an  amusing  case.  He  might 
claim  damages  of,  let  us  say,  £7,000,000  or  even  £10,000- 
ooo,  for  he  is  a  man  of  gigantic  interests,  claiming  these 
damages  on  the  score  that  his  alleged  libellers  have 
injured  his  reputation  as  a  man  of  business  in  all  quart- 
ers of  the  world.  They  would  have  him  the  craziest 
muddler  and  the  most  easily  swindled  imbecile  outside 
Fleet  Street — where  alone  wisdom  is  to  be  found.  How 
one  would  enjoy  a  verbatim  report  of  the  cross-examin- 
ation of  these  critics  in  their  own  newspapers. 

I  will  endeavour  to  show  that  Lord  Inverforth  is  not 
quite  so  consummate  an  ass  as  his  critics  would  have  the 


LORD  INVERFORTH  139 

public  to  believe,  but  rather  one  of  the  very  greatest 
men,  in  his  own  particular  line,  who  ever  came  to  the 
rescue  of  a  chaotic  Government. 

Let  me  not  be  supposed  to  insist  that  a  great  man  of 
business  is  a  great  man.  I  regard  Lord  Inverforth 
as  an  exceedingly  great  man  of  business,  one  of  the  very 
greatest  in  the  world,  and  this  fact  I  hope  to  make  clear 
in  a  few  lines,  but  I  do  not  regard  him  as  a  national 
hero  in  the  wider  sense  of  that  term.  He  has  too  many 
lacks  for  that,  and  some  of  them  essential  to  true  and 
catholic  greatness. 

He  could  never  fire  the  imagination  of  a  people, 
nor  does  he  convey  a  warm  and  generous  feeling  to  the 
heart.  His  enthusiasms  are  all  of  a  subdued  nature. 
The  driving  force  in  his  character  which  has  made  him 
so  powerful  a  man  of  business,  owes  little  to  the  higher 
virtues.  He  has  found  the  plain  of  life  too  full  of 
absorbing  interest  and  too  crowded  with  abounding 
opportunities  for  getting  on  to  raise  his  eyes  to  the 
mountains.  This  is  not  to  say  that  he  is  a  man  of  no 
ideals,  but  to  say  that  his  ideals  are  of  too  practical  and 
prosaic  a  kind  ever  to  stir  the  pulses  with  excitement. 

Nevertheless  I  regard  him  as  a  born  statesman,  and 
could  wish  that  the  conditions  of  political  life  made  it 
more  easy  for  a  man  of  his  gifts  to  serve  the  country 
than  men  with  the  gifts  of,  let  us  say,  Dr.  Macnamara 
or  Sir  Hamar  Greenwood. 

The  world  knows  so  little  of  him  that  perhaps  I  may 
begin  my  political  reflections  in  this  case  with  a  brief 


140  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

summary  of  his  career,  such  details  of  a  business  man's 
biography  as  may  contribute  to  an  understanding  of  his 
character. 

Andrew  Weir,  as  he  was  in  those  days,  went  to 
school  at  Kirkcaldy,  where  he  was  chiefly  notable  for 
seeking  information  on  more  subjects  than  came  under 
the  jurisdiction  of  his  pedagogue's  ferule.  A  benign 
Rosa  Dartle  might  have  been  his  godmother.  He  was 
for  ever  consulting  encyclopaedias  and  books  of  refer- 
ence. However  badly  he  knew  his  Greek  verbs  or  his 
Latin  syntax  he  had  a  very  shrewd  and  curious  know- 
ledge of  the  world  when  he  left  school  at  fifteen  to  enter 
the  local  branch  of  the  Commercial  Bank  of  Scotland. 

At  school  he  had  wanted  to  own  ships.  This  ambi- 
tion still  lodged  in  his  brain.  His  thoughts  were  all  at 
sea.  There  was  no  romance  in  the  world  so  pleasing 
to  his  soul  as  the  romance  of  the  merchant  marine.  He 
had  a  real  passion  for  harbours.  He  loved  the  idea  of 
far  voyages.  The  smells  of  cargoes  and  warehouses 
composed  a  sea-bouquet  for  him  which  he  esteemed 
sweeter  than  all  the  scents  of  hedges  and  wood.  If 
there  was  a  big  man  for  him  in  the  world  it  was  the  sailor. 

I  don't  think  he  had  so  profound  a  feeling  for  bankers. 
Not  quite  so  downright  as  Lord  Leverhulme  in  stating 
his  opinion  of  bankers,  Lord  Inverforth  nevertheless 
regards  them  on  the  whole  as  lacking  in  courage  and 
imagination.  He  said  to  himself  on  his  banker's  stool, 
"I  will  learn  all  I  can,  but  I  won't  stay  here;  I'll  be  a 
shipowner." 


LORD  INVERFORTH  141 

In  his  twentieth  year  he  bought  a  sailing  ship.  This 
was  at  Glasgow  in  the  year  1885.  He  called  himself 
Andrew  Weir  and  Co.  He  had  the  feeling  that  sailing 
ships,  engaged  in  coastwise  trade,  might  be  bigger.  He 
announced  his  intention  of  building  a  large  coasting 
ship.  People  informed  him,  with  an  almost  evangelical 
anxiety  as  to  his  commercial  salvation,  that  he  was  a 
lunatic.  But  the  big  ship  was  a  success.  He  built 
more  and  bigger.  Then,  in  1896  he  said  to  himself, 
"Why  shouldn't  steam  be  used  in  the  coasting  trade?" 
and  he  went  into  steam.  Again  there  were  inquiries 
after  his  mental  health,  but  the  steamer  flourished  like 
the  big  sailing  ship.  At  the  beginning  of  what  the  cur- 
ate called  "this  so-called  twentieth  century"  the  firm 
of  Andrew  Weir  and  Co.  flew  its  flag  in  all  the  ports 
under  heaven,  and  controlled  the  largest  fleet  of  sailing 
ships  in  the  world. 

There  is  this  fact  to  be  noticed  in  particular.  Mr. 
Andrew  Weir's  inquisitive  mind  had  not  merely  mas- 
tered the  grammar  of  shipowning  but  had  crammed  the 
cells  of  his  brain  with  the  whole  encyclopaedia  of  com- 
mercial geography.  He  knew  each  season  what  the 
least  of  the  islands  of  the  world  was  producing,  and  the 
crops,  manufactures,  and  financial  condition  of  every 
country  across  the  sea.  He  knew,  also,  the  way  in 
which  the  various  nations  conducted  the  business  of 
transport.  From  his  office  in  Glasgow  he  could  see  the 
whole  vast  labours  of  industrious  and  mercantile  man, 
that  Brobdingnagian  ant  of  this  revolving  globe, 


142  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

merely  by  closing  his  eyes.  The  map  of  the  world's 
commerce  was  cinematographed  upon  his  brain. 

One  thing  more  remains  to  be  said.  Mr.  Andrew 
Weir  inherited  the  moral  traditions  of  Scotch  industry. 
He  grew  rich,  but  not  ostentatious.  His  increasing 
fortune  went  back  and  back  into  trade.  He  never 
dreamed  either  of  cutting  a  figure  in  plutocratic  society 
or  making  himself  a  public  character.  A  quiet,  rather 
shy,  and  not  often  articulate  person,  he  lived  a  frugal 
life,  loving  his  business  because  it  occupied  all  his  time 
and  satisfied  nearly  every  curiosity  of  his  inquiring 
mind. 

War  came,  and  Mr.  Weir  was  busier  than  ever  with 
his  ships.  Not  until  1917  did  it  occur  to  the  Govern- 
ment that  the  work  of  buying  supplies  for  its  gigantic 
armies  was  something  only  to  be  mastered  by  a  man  of 
business.  The  nation  may  be  grateful  to  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  for  having  discovered  in  Glasgow  perhaps  the 
one  man  in  the  British  Isles  who  knew  everything  there 
was  to  know  about  commercial  geography. 

Mr.  Andrew  Weir  entered  the  War  Office  in  March, 
1 9 1 7 ,  as  Surveyor  General  of  Supply.  The  position  was 
not  merely  difficult  in  its  nature,  but  difficult  in  its 
circumstances.  Soldiers  are  jealous  animals,  and  not 
easily  does  the  War  Office  take  to  the  black-coated  man 
of  business.  Mr.  Weir  was  tact  itself.  For  some 
weeks  the  soldiers  were  hardly  aware  of  his  presence, 
then  they  learned  that  the  quiet  Scotsman  in  the  black 
coat  was  saying  the  most  laudatory  things  about  their 


LORD  INVERFORTH  143 

organization ;  then  they  found  themselves  marvellously 
improving  this  organization  merely  by  acting  on  the 
most  modestly  given  suggestions  from  the  smooth 
civilian;  and  finally  the  very  greatest  of  them  dis- 
covered that  somehow  or  another  Supply  had  now 
got  a  wonderful  "move  on,"  and  that  among  other 
things  this  wonderful  "move  on"  had  brought  the 
civilian  on  top  of  them — still  smooth  and  modest,  still 
in  the  background,  but  absolute  master  of  the 
whole  machinery. 

Lord  Inverforth's  work  soon  involved  not  merely 
the  care  of  the  British  Armies  but  the  care  of  the  Allied 
nations.  What  did  he  do?  Besieged  by  the  uncon- 
scionable rascals  of  the  world,  fawning  or  blustering 
to  get  contracts  at  extraordinary  prices,  Lord  Inverforth 
struck  a  master  blow  at  this  international  cupidity  by 
obtaining  control  of  the  principal  raw  materials  and 
instituting  the  system  of  costing.  Manufacturers  got 
their  contracts  on  a  fixed  basis  of  profits.  Lord  Inver- 
forth knew  the  exact  cost  of  every  stage  in  the  manu- 
facture of  each  article  he  bought,  and  he  saw  that  the 
manufacturer  received  from  the  taxpayer  only  a  small 
percentage  of  profit  on  that  cost. 

The  greatest  thing  he  did  at  that  time,  and  the  brav- 
est, for  he  did  it  without  authorization  and  at  a  cost  of 
£250,000,000,  was  to  buy  up  the  Australasian  wool-clip 
from  1917  to  1920.  In  this  way  Germany  was  doomed 
to  defeat.  England,  so  to  speak,  had  the  clothing  of 
humanity  in  her  right  hand. 


144  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

But  Lord  Inverforth  also  controlled  flax,  hemp, 
leather,  and  jute,  so  that  the  enemy's  case  was  as  hope- 
less as  our  own  was  secure. 

These  gigantic  operations  involved  an  expenditure 
of  over  £500,000,000.  They  brought  an  actual  profit 
to  the  British  Government  of  over  £20,000,000,  saved 
the  taxpayer  Heaven  only  knows  how  many  millions, 
and  were  conducted  at  an  administrative  cost  of  three 
shillings  for  every  £100. 

Nothing  like  it  had  ever  been  done  before  in  the 
world. 

Early  in  1919  Lord  Inverforth  was  asked  to  clear  up 
war's  rubbish-heap.  He  became  Minister  of  Munitions. 
Within  twenty-four  hours  his  body  of  expert  buyers 
had  become  the  Disposal  Board — a  body  of  expert 
sellers. 

The  property  of  the  British  taxpayer  was  scattered 
over  four  continents,  and  in  all  manner  of  places  in 
those  four  continents.  It  was  composed  of  350,000 
different  kinds  of  things. 

At  once  Lord  Inverforth  was  again  besieged  by  the 
rascals.  There  was  an  army  of  them,  composed  of 
many  "rings,"  seeking  to  buy  up  these  "waste  prod- 
ucts of  war"  at  a  knock-down  price.  At  the  same 
time  came  the  blustering  contractor,  cheated  by  peace 
of  his  contract,  with  a  claim  for  millions  on  one  ground 
or  another. 

Lord  Inverforth  made  it  clear,  first,  that  the  stores 
were  to  be  sold  at  a  commercial  value,  and,  second,  that 


LORD  INVERFORTH  145 

he  would  protect  the  taxpayer  against  extortionate 
claims  on  the  part  of  contractors.  As  regards  this 
second  difficulty,  pressure  was  brought  against  him  from 
the  very  highest  political  quarters  to  admit  certain 
claims  and  to  avoid  legal  action.  His  reply  was, ' '  I  will 
resign  before  I  initial  those  claims." 

He  fought  them  all,  and  he  beat  them  all.  He 
saved  the  taxpayer  millions  of  pounds. 

As  for  the  disposal  of  stores,  he  has  already  brought 
to  the  Exchequer  over  £500,000,000,  and  before  these 
pages  are  printed  that  sum  may  be  increased  to  some- 
thing like  £800,000,000. 

The  least  imaginative  reader  will  perceive  from  this 
brief  statement  that  a  veritable  Napoleon  of  Commerce 
v^s  presided  over  the  business  side  of  the  war.  Where 
there  was  every  opportunity  for  colossal  waste,  there 
has  been  the  most  scientific  economy ;  where  there  was 
every  likelihood  of  wholesale  corruption,  there  has  been 
an  unsleeping  vigilance  of  honesty;  and  where,  at  the 
end,  there  might  have  been  a  tired  carelessness  resulting 
in  ruinous  loss,  there  has  been  up  to  the  very  last 
moment  an  unremitting  enthusiasm  for  the  taxpayers' 
interest  which  has  resulted  in  a  credit  contribution  to 
the  national  balance  sheet  of  £800,000,000. 

I  have  left  to  the  last  this  not  unworthy  feature 
of  Lord  Inverforth's  labours.  Those  labours  have  been 
given  to  the  nation.  He,  at  the  head  of  things,  and 
the  chiefs  of  the  Disposal  Board  under  him,  have 
refused  to  accept  any  financial  reward.  One  and  all 


146  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

they  deserted  their  businesses  and  slaved  from  morning 
to  night  in  the  national  interests,  and  one  and  all  they 
gave  their  services  to  the  State. 

What  has  been  Lord  Inverforth's  reward  from  the 
public?  From  first  to  last  he  has  been  attacked  by  a 
considerable  section  of  the  Press,  and  has  been  accused 
in  Parliament  of  incredible  waste  and  incorrigible  stu- 
pidity. Let  it  be  supposed  (I  do  not  grant  it  for  a 
moment)  that  he  made  mistakes,  even  very  great 
mistakes,  still,  on  the  total  result  of  his  gigantic  labours, 
does  not  the  public  owe  him  a  debt  of  gratitude  ?  Has 
he  not  been  an  honest  man  at  the  head  of  a  department 
where  dishonesty  had  its  chief  opportunity?  Did  he 
not  strike  a  death  blow  at  Germany  when  he  secured, 
with  a  suddenness  which  ruined  his  rivals  in  the  field, 
the  wool-clip  of  the  world?  Is  there  one  man  in  these 
islands  who  thought  for  a  moment  that  the  overplus  of 
stores  would  fetch  a  sum  of  £800,000,000? 

I  will  say  a  word  about  Slough,  which  is  still  the 
favourite  cry  of  Lord  Inverforth's  critics,  who  have 
held  their  peace  about  the  "dumps"  since  the  publi- 
cation of  the  White  Paper  describing  the  sale  of  stores. 

Slough  was  the  work  of  the  War  Office.  It  was  begun 
badly.  Mistakes  of  a  serious  kind  were  made.  It 
might  have  been  a  financial  disaster.  But  Lord 
Inverforth  is  a  chivalrous  man.  He  has  never  dis- 
closed the  fact  that  he  inherited  Slough.  In  the  face 
of  violent  criticism  he  has  maintained  a  dignified  silence, 
letting  the  world  think  that  he  was  the  parent  of  the 


LORD  INVERFORTH  147 

idea,  and  bending  all  his  energies  to  make  it  a  success. 
He  has  had  his  reward.  Slough  has  been  sold  and  the 
transaction  shows  a  profit  for  the  taxpayer. 

During  the  last  years  of  his  administration  I  saw  a 
good  deal  of  Lord  Inverforth.  He  was  anxious  to  get 
back  to  his  own  work.  He  asked  again  and  again  to  be 
relieved  of  his  duties — the  machinery  he  had  set  up 
being  in  excellent  running  order.  But  the  Prime 
Minister  begged  him  to  stay,  and  he  has  stayed,  against 
his  will  and  against  his  own  interests,  and  all  the  time 
he  has  been  subjected  to  a  stream  of  malignant  criticism. 

Let  the  reader  ask  himself  whether  the  case  of  Lord 
Inverforth  is  likely  to  encourage  the  best  brains  in  the 
country  to  come  to  the  political  service  of  the  nation. 
Is  there  not  a  danger  that  we  may  fall  into  the  American 
position,  and  have  our  great  men  in  commerce  and  our 
second-rate  men  in  politics  ? 

I  regard  Lord  Inverforth  as  one  of  the  few  very  great 
men  in  commerce  who  have  the  qualities  of  genuine 
statesmanship.  I  am  not  at  liberty  to  give  my  chief 
grounds  for  this  belief,  but  before  long  the  world  may 
know  from  Lord  Inverforth's  commercial  activities  on 
the  Continent  that  more  than  any  other  man  in  these 
islands  he  has  seen  the  way  and  taken  the  step  to 
reconstruct  the  shattered  civilization  of  Europe. 

On  many  occasions  I  have  discussed  with  him  the 
future  of  mankind.  I  have  found  him  the  least  anxious 
and  always  the  most  self-possessed  observer  of  events. 
Quiet,  patient,  practical,  and  imaginative,  inspired  too 


148  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

by  humane  motives,  he  cherishes  the  unshakable  faith 
that  Great  Britain  is  destined  to  lead  civilization  into 
the  future  as  far  as  human  eye  can  see.  He  places  his 
faith  in  British  character.  Rivalry  on  the  part  of 
powerful  nations,  even  when  it  is  directed  against  our 
key  industries,  does  not  disturb  him  in  the  least. 
While  others  are  crying,  "How  shall  we  save  our- 
selves ?"  he  is  pushing  the  fortunes  of  the  British  race  in 
every  quarter  of  the  world.  And  where  British  trade 
goes,  on  the  whole  there  goes  too  the  highest  civilizing 
power  in  the  world — British  character.  It  is  significant 
of  his  faith  that  he  has  ever  worked  to  get  the  British 
mercantile  marine  manned  by  men  of  the  British  race, 
and  to  this  end  has  led  the  way  in  improving  the  condi- 
tions of  the  British  seaman's  life. 

"All  the  fallacies  and  wild  theories  of  revolutionary 
minds, ' '  he  once  said  to  me, ' '  break  ultimately  on  the  rock 
of  industrial  fact.  The  more  freely  nations  trade  together 
the  more  clearly  will  it  be  seen  that  humanity  must  work 
out  its  salvation  within  the  limits  of  economic  law.  And 
the  way  to  a  smooth  working  out  of  that  salvation  is  by 
recognizing  the  claims  of  the  moral  law.  We  are  men  be- 
fore we  are  merchants.  There  is  no  reason  why  mistrust 
should  exist  between  management  and  labour.  The  eco- 
nomic law  by  no  means  excludes,  but  rather  demands, 
humaneness.  I  believe  that  a  system  of  profit  sharing 
can  be  devised  which  will  bring  management  and 
labour  into  a  sensible  partnership.  Selfishness  on  the 
part  of  capital  is  as  bad  as  selfishness  on  the  part  of 


LORD  INVERFORTH  149 

labour.  Both  must  be  unselfish,  both  must  think  of 
the  general  community,  and  both  must  work  hard. 
The  two  chief  enemies  of  mankind  are  moral  slackness 
and  physical  slackness." 

There  is  no  man  living  who  would  make  a  better 
Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  than  this  merchant  prince 
who,  however,  has  had  enough  of  politics  and  is  going 
back  very  gladly  to  his  desk  in  the  City.  He  is  not  in 
the  least  soured  by  the  public  ingratitude,  and  rightly 
judges  it  to  be  rather  the  voice  of  unscrupulous  and 
stunt-seeking  journalism  than  the  considered  judgment 
of  the  nation.  But  he  has  a  very  poor  opinion  of  the 
way  in  which  the  Government  of  the  country  conducts 
its  business. 


LORD  LEVERHULME 


LORD  LEVERHULME,  iST  BARON 
(WILLIAM  HESKETH  LEVER) 

Born  1851,  Lancashire.     Educ.:  Bolton  Church  Institute;  Chairman 
of  Lever  Bros.,  Port  Sunlight;  High  Sheriff,  Lancaster,  1917. 


LORD    LEVERHULME 


u.  &u. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
LORD   LEVERHULME 

"Dullness  is  so  much  stronger  than  genius  because  there  is  so  much  more 
of  it,  and  it  is  better  organized  and  more  naturally  cohesive  inter  se.  So 
the  Arctic  volcano  can  do  nothing  against  Arctic  ice." — SAMUEL  BUTLER. 

THE  reader  may  properly  wonder  to  find  the  figure  of 
Lord  Leverhulme  brought  before  the  mirrors  of  Down- 
ing Street. 

But  let  me  explain  why  I  introduce  this  industrial 
Triton  into  the  society  of  our  political  minnows. 

Lord  Leverhulme  rejected  politics  only  when  politics 
rejected  him.  He  is  of  that  distinguished  company  to 
whom  the  House  of  Commons  has  turned  both  a  deaf 
ear  and  a  cold  shoulder.  He  failed  where  Mr.  Walter 
Long  succeeded,  and  fell  where  Dr.  Macnamara  rose. 

I  once  asked  a  Cabinet  Minister  how  it  was  that  a 
man  of  such  conspicuous  quality  had  failed  to  win  office. 
"I  really  cannot  tell  you, "  he  replied  with  complacency, 
"but  I  remember  very  well  that  the  House  of  Commons 
never  took  to  him.  It  is  curious  how  many  men  who 
do  well  outside  the  House  of  Commons  fail  to  make  good 
inside." 

Curious  indeed!  But  more  curious  still,  we  may 
surely  say,  that  the  House  of  Commons  should  continue, 

153 


154  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

in  the  light  of  this  knowledge,  to  enjoy  so  good  an  opin- 
ion of  itself. 

I  suppose  that  nobody  will  now  dispute  that  Lord 
Leverhulme  is  easily  the  foremost  industrialist,  not 
merely  in  the  British  Isles,  but  in  the  world.  I  can 
think  of  no  one  who  approaches  him  in  the  creative 
faculty.  Not  even  America,  the  country  of  big  men 
and  big  businesses,  has  produced  a  man  of  this  truly 
colossal  stature.  Mr.  Rockefeller  is  a  name  for  a 
committee.  Mr.  Carnegie  was  pushed  to  fortune  by 
his  more  resolute  henchmen.  But  Lord  Leverhulme,  as 
is  very  well  known  in  America,  has  been  the  sole  archi- 
tect of  his  tremendous  fortunes,  and  in  all  his  numerous 
undertakings  exercises  the  power  of  an  unquestioned 
autocrat. 

Mr.  Lloyd  George  once  remarked  to  me  that  the 
trouble  with  Lord  Leverhulme  is  that  he  cannot  work 
with  other  men.  But  this  is  only  true  in  part.  Lord 
Leverhulme  can  work  very  well  with  men  who  are  not 
fools.  When  I  told  him  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  remark, 
"Well,  I  don't  know,"  he  replied,  "  I  have  been  working 
with  other  men  all  my  life!"  Yes,  but  this,  too, 
expresses  only  part  of  the  truth.  He  has  been  working 
with  these  other  men  as  an  accepted  master. 

It  is  not  so  in  politics.  There  a  man  of  power  cannot 
pick  and  choose  his  colleagues.  He  must  work  with 
fools  as  well  as  men  of  ability.  And  never  can  he  work 
as  a  master.  Always  at  the  Cabinet  table  he  will 
find  a  cabal  of  deadheads  opposed  to  the  exercise  of 


LORD  LEVERHULME  155 

his  authority,  and  in  the  department  over  which  he  is 
set  to  rule  a  bunch  of  traditional  Barnacles,  without 
one  spark  of  imagination  between  them,  who  will  fight 
his  new  ideas  at  every  turn. 

The  essence  of  politics  and  government  is  mediocrity. 
The  good  sense  of  the  House  of  Commons  is  a  con- 
spiracy to  resist  genius  and  to  enthrone  the  average 
man.  A  department  of  the  State  is  well  governed  only 
when  its  chief  Civil  Servant,  by  the  grace  of  God, 
chances  to  be  a  man  of  statesmanlike  capacity. 

Like  Lord  Rhondda,  Lord  Leverhulme  was  ap- 
proached by  the  Government  during  the  numerous 
crises  of  the  war  to  render  service  to  the  State.  His 
experience  in  this  respect  confirmed  his  judgment  that 
our  system  of  government  is  a  chaos  which  would 
hardly  be  tolerated  in  a  business  establishment  of  the 
second  class.  I  will  give  an  incident. 

It  was  a  matter  of  grave  urgency  to  the  Government 
that  margarine  should  be  manufactured  in  this  country. 
A  Cabinet  Minister  begged  Lord  Leverhulme,  on  the 
score  of  patriotism,  to  set  up  such  a  factory.  Lord 
Leverhulme  expressed  his  willingness  to  take  up  the 
project,  but  said  that  he  must  go  to  the  public  for  a 
certain  sum  of  money  to  carry  it  out.  The  Cabinet 
Minister  made  no  demur  to  this  very  natural  proposal, 
but  suggested  that  it  might  be  well  if  Lord  Leverhulme 
would  call  at  the  Treasury  and  inform  them  of  his 
purpose. 

Accordingly  the  great  industrialist,  able  as  was  no 


156  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

other  man  in  this  particular  to  serve  his  country's 
need,  called  humbly  at  the  Treasury  for  permission  to 
ask  the  public  for  capital.  He  was  received  by  an 
official  who  refused  point-blank  to  listen  to  such  a  pro- 
position. Lord  Leverhulme  mentioned  again  the  name 
of  the  Cabinet  Minister  who  had  requested  him  to 
embark  on  this  venture.  This  was  nothing  to  the 
official.  He  had  nothing  to  do  with  other  depart- 
ments. His  business  was  to  see  that  the  public's  money 
came  to  the  Treasury;  he  was  certainly  not  going 
to  countenance  the  raising  of  money  for  an  industrial 
purpose. 

You  could  no  more  have  got  into  this  gentleman's 
head  than  you  could  have  got  into  the  head  of  a  rabbit 
the  idea  that  money  invested  in  an  essential  industrial 
undertaking  pays  the  State  far  better  than  money 
advanced  to  it  at  the  cost  of  five  per  cent. 

Not  to  weary  the  reader  with  an  incident,  however 
telling,  the  end  of  this  affair  was  that  after  going  back- 
wards and  forwards  between  a  Cabinet  Minister  and  a 
Treasury  official,  Lord  Leverhulme  was  at  last  per- 
mitted to  ask  the  public  for  a  small  sum  of  money  which 
he  himself  considered  inadequate  for  the  Government's 
purpose. 

I  have  never  heard  him  speak  bitterly  of  his  political 
experiences,  but  I  have  never  heard  him  express  any- 
thing but  an  amused  contempt  for  the  antiquated 
machinery  which  passes  amongst  politicians  for  a  sys- 
tem of  government. 


LORD  LEVERHULME  157 

The  English  [he  says]  have  pushed  their  fortunes,  never 
by  the  aid  of  Government,  but  on  the  contrary  almost 
always  in  the  teeth  of  Government  opposition.  There  is 
no  man  so  lacking  in  imagination  as  a  Government  official, 
and  no  man,  unless  it  is  a  banker,  so  wanting  in  courage  as  a 
Cabinet  Minister.  The  wealth  of  England  is  the  creation  of 
her  industrial  population.  The  brains,  the  faith,  the  energy 
of  the  capitalist,  and  the  brains,  the  loyalty,  the  strength 
of  labour,  these  have  made  us  the  first  nation  of  the  world. 
There  has  been  only  one  real  obstacle  in  our  path.  Not 
foreign  competition,  for  that  is  an  incentive,  but  the  coward- 
ice and  stupidity  of  Governments.  We  possess  an  empire 
unrivalled  in  its  opportunities  for  trade  and  commerce,  an 
empire  which,  you  would  surely  think,  could  not  fail  to 
inspire  a  statesman  with  great  ideas.  But  what  happens? 
We  have  a  Government  which  thinks  it  has  exhausted  states- 
manship by  crippling  industry  at  home  in  order  to  pay  off 
our  war  debt  as  quickly  as  possible.  Instead  of  setting 
itself  to  create  more  wealth,  with  the  wealth  of  the  world 
lying  at  its  feet,  it  sets  itself  to  dry  up  the  sources  of  wealth 
at  the  centre  of  the  empire.  But  it  is  no  use  talking. 
One  thing  a  Government  in  this  country  cannot  stand  is 
imagination;  and  another  is  courage.  The  British  Empire 
is  in  the  hands  of  a  lot  of  clerks — and  timid  clerks  at  that. 
We  must  do  our  best  to  get  along  without  statesmanship  at 
the  head. 


The  reader  may  not  remember  that  some  years  before 
Mr.  Lloyd  George  plunged  into  a  disordered  series  of 
social  reforms,  Lord  Leverhulme,  sitting  in  the  House  of 
Commons,  introduced  Bills  of  a  reasonable  and  con- 
nected character  to  ensure  workmen  against  unemploy- 
ment and  to  set  up  a  system  of  old  age  pensions.  He 
did  not  enter  Parliament  for  his  own  glorification.  He 


158  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

had  nothing  to  gain,  but  much  to  lose,  by  devoting 
himself  to  the  business  of  Westminster.  But  he 
believed  that  he  could  benefit  the  State  as  a  legislator, 
and  he  entered  Parliament  with  the  definite  intention 
of  introducing  order  into  what  was  self-evidently  a 
condition  of  dangerous  chaos.  He  had  a  remedy  for 
slums,  a  remedy  for  unemployment,  a  remedy  for  the 
poverty  of  the  workman  in  old  age,  and  a  remedy 
for  the  educational  deadlock.  Further,  he  cherished 
the  hope  that  he  might  do  something  towards  develop- 
ing the  wealth  and  power  of  the  British  Empire,  without 
impairing  the  spirit  of  individualism  which,  in  his  faith, 
is  the  driving  power  of  British  fortune. 

How  many  men  who  entered  the  House  of  Commons 
with  no  ideas  at  all  have  been  taken  to  the  friendly 
bosom  of  that  assembly?  Moreover,  can  the  reader 
name  with  confidence  one  Cabinet  Minister  in  the  past 
twenty  years  who  can  fairly  be  compared  in  creative 
genius  with  this  remarkable  man  to  whom  the  House  of 
Commons  refused  the  least  of  its  rewards? 

I  saw  Lord  Leverhulme  on  several  occasions  at  the 
end  of  the  war.  He  spoke  to  me  with  great  freedom 
of  his  ideas  in  the  hope  that  I  might  carry  them  with 
effect  to  the  Prime  Minister.  He  proved  to  me  that  it 
was  the  nonsense  of  a  schoolboy  to  talk  of  making 
Germany  pay  for  the  war,  and  suggested  that  the 
Prime  Minister's  main  appeal  to  the  nation  at  the 
General  Election  of  1918  should  be  a  moral  appeal  for 
unity  in  the  industrial  world.  He  had  one  master 


LORD  LEVERHULME  159 

word  for  that  great  moment  in  our  history.  It  was 
the  word  "Production." 

I  found  this  word  unpopular  in  Downing  Street. 
Mr.  Lloyd  George  was  more  mindful  of  Lord  Northcliffe 
than  of  one  "who  cannot  work  with  other  men."  And 
so  the  word  went  forth  to  the  British  peoples :  Germany 
must  pay  for  the  war  and  the  Kaiser  must  be  tried. 
At  the  eleventh  hour  before  the  election  there  was  no 
equivocation.  Germany  should  pay  for  the  war.  The 
Kaiser  should  be  tried.  Instead  of  a  great  moral  appeal, 
which  might  have  prevented  all  the  disastrous  conflicts 
in  industry,  and  might  have  preserved  the  spirit  of 
loyalty  which  had  united  the  people  during  the  war, 
the  Prime  Minister  put  himself  at  the  head  of  a  dis- 
reputable mob  calling  for  revenge. 

"One  disadvantage  of  the  democratic  system,"  says 
Mr.  Birrell,  "is  that  a  Prime  Minister  no  longer  feels 
himself  responsible  for  good  government.  He  awaits  a 
'mandate'  from  a  mob  who  are  watching  a  football 
match." 

We  have  only  to  compare  this  order  of  mind  with  a 
mind  like  Lord  Leverhulme's  to  perceive  how  it  is  that 
politics  in  our  country  tend  more  and  more  in  the 
American  direction.  The  big  men  are  outside.  Politics 
are  little  more  than  a  platform  for  a  pugilistic  kind  of 
rhetoric.  He  who  can  talk  glibly  and  with  occasional 
touches  of  such  sentiment alism  as  one  finds  in  a  Penny 
Reciter  is  assured  of  the  ear  of  the  House  of  Commons, 
and  may  fairly  count  on  one  day  becoming  a  Minister  of 


160  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

State.  But  the  field  for  the  constructive,  imaginative, 
and  creative  minds  is  the  field  of  commerce. 

The  danger  of  the  State  from  this  condition  of  things 
is,  unhappily,  not  only  the  loss  of  creative  statesman- 
ship at  the  head  of  the  nation — serious  as  that  is.  The 
danger  is  greater.  Small  men  are  more  likely  to  fall 
into  dishonest  ways  than  big  men.  There  lies,  I  think, 
our  greatest  danger.  It  seems  to  me,  observing  our 
public  life  with  some  degree  of  intimacy,  that  there 
is  a  growing  tendency  for  the  gentleman  to  fall  out  of  the 
political  ranks  and  for  his  place  to  be  filled  by  the 
professional  politician,  who  in  many  cases  appears  to  be 
almost  entirely  without  moral  principle.  What  can 
become  of  such  a  movement  save  eventual  corruption? 
At  present  our  politics  are  stupid  but  fairly  honest. 
There  are  still  representatives  of  the  old  school  in  the 
House  of  Commons.  But  the  conquering  advance  is 
from  the  ranks  of  professionalism. 

I  would  not  have  the  reader  to  suppose  that  I  considei 
Lord  Leverhulme  a  heaven-sent  genius  of  statesmanship. 
The  British  constitution  is  twelve  men  in  a  box,  and  the 
very  spirit  of  that  arrangement  is  distrust  of  the  expert. 
Moreover,  there  is  wisdom  in  the  Eastern  legend  which 
says  that  in  making  genius  the  fairies  left  out  one  essen- 
tial gift — the  knowledge  of  when  to  stop. 

Whether  Lord  Leverhulme  would  have  made  a  better 
statesman  than,  let  us  say,  Sir  Henry  Campbell 
Bannerman  or  Mr.  Bonar  Law  it  is  surely  certain,  I 
think,  that  a  true  statesman  would  have  made  every 


LORD  LEVERHULME  161 

conceivable  use  of  his  unusual  mind.  This,  as  I  look  at 
things,  is  the  ideal  method  of  government.  I  do  not 
believe  in  the  business  man  as  statesman.  I  believe  in 
the  trained,  cultured,  and  incorruptible  gentleman  as 
statesman,  and  the  business  man  as  his  adviser. 

But  until  our  politics  are  of  a  higher  order  we  can 
hardly  expect  the  best  minds  in  the  nation  to  feel  any 
attraction  to  a  political  career.  More  and  more  the 
professional  politician,  the  narrow  man,  the  man  of  the 
loud  voice  and  the  one  idea,  the  man  who  has  few 
instincts  of  honesty  in  his  mind  and  no  movement  of 
high  and  disinterested  patriotism  in  his  soul,  will  press 
himself  upon  the  attention  of  democracy  and  by  intimid- 
ating his  leaders  and  brow-beating  his  opponents  force 
his  way  onward  to  office. 

The  consideration  of  this  grave  peril  to  the  moral 
character  of  our  public  life  brings  me  to  my  brief 
conclusion. 


CONCLUSION 


CHAPTER  XIV 
CONCLUSION 

"  While  the  advances  made  by  objective  science  and  its  industrial  appli- 
cations are  palpable  and  undeniable  all  around  us,  it  is  a  matter  of  doubt 
and  dispute  if  our  social  and  moral  advance  towards  happiness  and  virtue 
has  been  great  or  any." — MARK  PATTISON. 

AFTER  all,  a  nation  gets  the  politics  that  it  deserves. 
The  fault  is  not  in  our  stars,  but  in  ourselves,  that  we 
are  underlings.  If  the  tone  of  public  life  is  a  low  one  it 
is  because  the  tone  of  society  is  not  a  high  one.  The 
remedy,  then,  is  not  "Sack  the  lot,"  but  rather, 
"Repent,  lest  a  worse  thing  befall  thee." 

It  seems  to  me  that  a  beginning  in  moral  and  social 
reformation  might  be  made  if  aristocracy  could  be 
encouraged  to  affirm  its  ancient  rights  by  the  perform- 
ance of  its  inherent  duties. 

We  are  a  nation  without  standards,  kept  in  health 
rather  by  memories  which  are  fading  than  by  examples 
which  are  compelling.  We  still  march  to  the  dying 
music  of  great  traditions  but  there  is  no  captain  of 
civilization  at  the  head  of  our  ranks.  We  have  indeed 
almost  ceased  to  be  an  army  marching  with  confidence 
towards  the  enemy,  and  have  become  a  mob  breaking  im- 
patiently loose  from  the  discipline  and  ideals  of  our  past. 

Aristocracy,  it  must  be  boldly  said,  has  played 

165 


166  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

traitor  to  England.  It  has  ceased  to  lead,  and  not 
because  it  has  been  thrust  from  its  rightful  place  by  the 
rude  hand  of  democracy,  but  because  it  has  deliberately 
preferred  the  company  of  the  vulgar.  No  one  has  pulled 
it  down,  it  has  itself  descended.  It  has  lost  its  respect 
for  learning,  it  has  grown  careless  of  manners,  it  has 
abandoned  faith  in  its  duty,  it  is  conscious  of  no  solemn 
obligations,  it  takes  no  interest  in  art,  it  is  indifferent 
to  science,  it  is  sick  of  effort,  it  has  surrendered  gladly 
and  gratefully  to  the  materialism  of  plutocracy. 

If  it  could  have  lost  itself  in  plutocracy  the  harm 
would  not  have  been  so  great;  but  it  still  remains  for 
the  multitude  a  true  aristocracy,  and  looking  up  to 
that  aristocracy  for  its  standards — an  aristocracy  whose 
private  life  is  now  public  property — the  multitude  has 
become  materialistic,  throwing  Puritanism  to  the  dogs, 
and  pushing  as  heartily  forward  to  the  trough  as  any 
full-fed  glutton  in  the  middle  or  the  upper  ranks  of  life. 

The  standards  set  by  the  privileged  classes  at  this 
time  are  the  same  standards  as  ruled  in  France  before  the 
Revolution.  There  is  no  example  of  modesty,  earnest- 
ness, restraint,  thrift,  duty,  or  culture.  Everything  is 
sensual  and  ostentatious,  and  shamefacedly  sensual 
and  ostentatious. 

It  is  time  for  the  best  people  in  aristocracy  to  set 
their  faces  against  this  wanton  and  destructive  spirit. 
It  is  time  a  halt  was  called  to  luxury  and  profligacy; 
time  that  the  door  was  shut  in  the  face  of  invading 
vulgarity.  Creation  has  not  agonized  in  bloody  sweat 


CONCLUSION  167 

through  countless  ages  of  suffering  and  achievement 
that  those  who  possess  the  highest  opportunities  for 
doing  good  should  pervert  those  opportunities  into  a 
mere  platform  for  the  display  of  a  harmful  badness. 
Evolution  was  not  aiming  at  Belgravia  when  it  set  out 
on  its  long  journey  from  the  flaming  mist  of  the  nebula. 
We  cannot  suppose  that  Nature  is  content  with  the 
egoism  of  the  social  butterfly.  The  very  blood  of  dead 
humanity  cries  out  for  a  higher  creature. 

Aristocracy,  one  sees,  is  too  apt  to  regard  itself  as 
the  spoilt  child  of  material  fortune,  instead  of  humbly 
and  with  a  sense  of  deepest  responsibility  accepting 
the  heavy  duties  of  moral  leadership  imposed  upon  it  by 
the  labours  of  evolution. 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that  the  children  of  the  present 
generation  of  aristocracy  may  grow  up  with  no  taste  for 
the  betting  ring,  the  card  room,  and  the  night  club,  or, 
at  any  rate,  that  a  certain  number  of  them  may  find 
their  highest  happiness  in  knowledge  and  wisdom  rather 
than  in  amateur  theatricals  and  fancy-dress  balls.  The 
human  mind,  after  all,  cannot  find  rest  in  triviality,  and 
after  so  long  a  period  of  the  most  sordid  and  vulgar 
self-indulgence  it  is  reasonable  to  hope  that  our  aristo- 
cracy may  experience  a  reaction. 

If  men  would  ask  themselves,  before  they  rush  out  to 
seek  her,  What  is  Pleasure?  and  consult  the  past 
history  of  humanity  as  well  as  their  own  senses  and 
inclinations  they  could  hardly  fail,  except  in  the  case  of 
the  most  degenerate,  to  discover  that  the  highest 


i68  THE  MIRRORS  OF  DOWNING  STREET 

happiness  is  not  of  the  nursery  or  the  kitchen,  but  rather 
of  the  living  spirit. 

Observation  of  nature,  love  of  beautiful  things, 
delight  in  noble  literature,  gratitude  for  the  highest 
forms  of  wit  and  humour,  sympathy  with  all  sorts  and 
conditions  of  men,  reverence  for  the  majesty  of  the 
universe,  kindness  to  all,  love  of  children,  and  devotion 
to  the  home,  these  operations  of  the  human  spirit  bring 
peace  to  the  heart  of  man  and  continue  their  minis- 
trations to  his  happiness  with  an  increasing  power  of 
joy  as  his  personality  enlarges  itself  to  receive  the  highest 
revelations  of  Life. 

Something  far  greater  than  she  is  now  doing  might 
be  done  by  the  Church  to  restore  the  sanctions  which 
once  ruled  human  conduct  and  gave  a  living  force  to 
public  opinion.  Religion  in  these  days  is  obviously  too 
complaisant.  To  watch  the  Church  in  the  world  is  to 
be  reminded  of  a  poor  relation  from  the  provinces  sitting 
silent  and  overawed  in  the  gilded  drawing-room  of  a 
parvenu.  There  is  no  sound  of  confidence  in  her  voice. 
She  whines  for  the  world's  notice  instead  of  denouncing 
its  very  obvious  sins.  She  is  too  much  in  this  world, 
and  too  little  in  the  other.  She  is  too  careful  not  to 
offend  Dives,  and  too  self-conscious  to  be  seen  openly 
in  the  company  of  Lazarus.  It  is  impossible  not  to 
think  that  a  coarse  world  has  shaken  her  faith  in  Christ- 
ian virtue.  She  clings  to  her  traditions  and  her  doc- 
trines, but  she  has  lost  the  vigorous  faith  in  spiritual  life 


CONCLUSION  169 

which  gave  beauty  to  those  traditions  and  has  ceased 
to  set  that  example  of  entire  self-sacrifice  which 
rendered  her  doctrines  less  difficult  of  interpre- 
tation by  the  instructed.  She  has  ceased  to  preach, 
even  with  the  dying  embers  of  conviction,  that  a  man 
may  gain  the  whole  world  and  yet  lose  his  soul  alive. 

A  responsibility  hardly  to  be  exceeded  by  that  of 
aristocracy  rests  upon  the  leaders  of  Labour.  Every 
voice  raised  to  encourage  the  economic  delusions  of 
Socialism  is  a  voice  on  the  side  of  vulgarity  and 
irreligion.  Most  of  the  leaders  of  Labour  know  per- 
fectly well  that  economic  Socialism  is  impossible,  but 
by  not  saying  so  with  honest  courage  they  commit  a 
grave  sin,  a  sin  not  only  against  society  but  against 
God.  For  democracy  in  England,  once  the  most  sen- 
sible and  kind-hearted  democracy  in  Europe,  is  placing 
its  faith  more  and  more  in  the  power  of  wages  to  buy 
happiness,  turning  away  with  more  and  more  impati- 
ence from  the  divine  truth  that  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven 
is  within  us. 

It  is  a  grievous  thing  to  corrupt  the  mind  of  the 
simple.  Democracy  in  England  has  been  the  chief 
representative  of  veritable  Englishness  up  to  these 
days.  It  was  never  Latinized  or  Frenchified.  The 
cottage  garden  refused  to  follow  the  bad  example  of  the 
"carpet-bedder."  The  poor  have  always  been  racy 
of  the  soil.  They  have  laughed  at  the  absurdities  of 
fashion  and  seen  through  the  pretensions  of  wealth. 


170  THE  MIRRORS  OP  DOWNING  STREET 

They  have  believed  in  heartiness  and  cheerfulness. 
All  their  proverbs  spring  out  of  a  keen  sense  of  virtue. 
All  their  games  are  of  a  manly  character.  To  material- 
ize this  glorious  people,  to  commercialize  and  mammon- 
ize  it,  to  make  it  think  of  economics  instead  of  life,  to 
make  it  bitter,  discontented,  and  tyrannous,  this  is  to 
strike  at  the  very  heart  of  England. 

But  though  the  leaders  of  Labour  are  guilty  of  this 
corruption,  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  ugliness  of  spirit 
in  democracy  is  the  reflection  of  the  ugly  life  led  by  the 
privileged  classes.  There  is  no  reproach  for  this 
democracy  when  it  looks  upward.  It  sees  nothing  but 
the  reckless  and  useless  display  of  wealth,  nothing  in 
the  full  sunshine  of  prosperity  but  a  Bacchanalian  horde 
of  irresponsible  sensualists,  nothing  there  but  a  ramp  of 
unashamed  hedonism,  and  a  hedonism  of  the  lowest  order. 

Democracy,  nursing  what  it  deems  to  be  its  economic 
wrongs,  and  not  unnaturally  regarding  the  wealthy 
classes  with  bitter  anger,  has  yet  to  learn  that  capital 
was  largely  the  creation  of  the  Puritan  character,  and 
that  the  prosperity  of  these  British  Islands  was  laid  in 
no  small  measure  by  the  thrift  and  temperance  of  those 
who  lived  simply  because  they  thought  deeply.  Capi- 
tal, without  which  Labour  could  have  done  little,  is  not 
a  contrivance  of  the  noisy  rich,  but  the  deliberate  crea- 
tion of  virtuous  men.  Capital,  now  regarded  as  an 
enemy,  was  once  the  visible  best  friend  of  Labour. 

Where  is  there  now  among  the  possessing  classes 
an  example  even  of  simplicity  in  dress,  modesty  in 


CONCLUSION  171 

behaviour,  temperance  in  conduct,  and  thrift  in  living  ? 
As  for  any  higher  example — an  example  of  wisdom, 
duty,  self-sacrifice,  and  moral  earnestness — it  is  nowhere 
visible  in  our  national  life  to  those  who  look  upward. 

Until  we  recover  this  ancient  spirit  our  politics  must 
continue  their  descent  to  the  abyss,  and  democracy 
will  listen  to  the  corrupting  delusions  of  the  economic 
Socialist. 

We  need  the  Puritan  element  in  our  characters,  the 
Hellenic  element  in  our  minds,  and  the  Christian 
element  in  our  souls.  We  must  set  a  higher  value  oh 
moral  qualities,  on  intellectual  qualities,  and  on  Christ- 
ian qualities.  We  must  learn  to  see,  not  gloomily  and 
heavily,  but  with  joy  and  thanksgiving,  that  our  world 
is  set  in  the  midst  of  an  infinite  universe,  that  it  has  a 
purpose  in  the  scheme  of  things,  that  we  are  all  members 
one  of  another,  and  that  there  is  no  grandeur  of  char- 
acter, mind,  or  soul  which  can  ever  be  worthy  of 
creation's  purpose. 

Less  flippancy  in  the  world  would  lead  to  more  serious- 
ness, more  seriousness  would  lead  to  greater  intelligence, 
and  greater  intelligence  would  lead  to  nobler  living. 

"The  cure  for  us,"  said  George  Sand,  "is  far  more 
simple  than  we  will  believe.  All  the  better  natures 
amongst  us  see  it  and  feel  it.  It  is  a  good  direction 
given  by  ourselves  to  our  hearts  and  consciences." 

Let  each  man  ask  himself,  Is  my  direction  worthy  of 
man's  past  and  hopeful  for  his  future? 


7  3  0  G 


This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below 

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